In my limited experience, the biggest gotchas are memory issues, power supply problems hard drive failures and heat...
1. Heat - when was the last time you opened up the case on the laptop and cleaned out all the dust and crud? This may be all it is, as the crud can (rarely) cause intermittent bad connections, but more importantly can cause parts to overheat and go into thermal shutdown... 2. Memory - Memtest86 is probably the most thourough tester for memory out there - and is included on most distro CD's as a boot option, set it up to do the most rigourous testing and let it run for multiple iterations... 3. Hard drive - defragging and re-organizing the drive is probably a good place to start, but don't really have a good suggestion for solid diagnostics, especially ones that are non-data damaging. 4. Power supply - does the failure pattern change depending on whether or not you are plugged into the wall? Certainly worth looking at the battery condition, especially in a unit that age. As a general diagnostic and repair tool I also recommend SystemRescueCD <http://www.sysresccd.org/SystemRescueCd_Homepage> which is a GNU/Linux based distro specifically designed for system testing and repair - good tool... ART ------------------ Arthur Torrey - <[email protected]> ------------------- Message: 1 Date: Sun, 12 May 2013 18:39:19 -0700 (PDT) From: Joel Kahn <[email protected]> To: [email protected], [email protected] Subject: [libreplanet-discuss] Diagnostic Software Message-ID: <[email protected]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii A relative of mine had her Dell laptop fail on her. It's an MS Windows 7 machine about three years old. Among other symptoms, it's doing spontaneous reboots fairly frequently. The built-in diagnostics didn't show problems, but I don't trust them under the circumstances. Since the warranty is long over, Dell charges a ludicrous price to fix it. I'd like suggestions on which bootable CD/DVD would be the best set of diagnostic tools for a full analysis of this thing. If the laptop is actually fixable without major hardware work, and I can get a novice-friendly Libre environment running on it, I think I just might be able to produce a few more converts to Software Freedom. Bring on the ideas.... Joel ------------------------------ _______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss End of libreplanet-discuss Digest, Vol 41, Issue 7 **************************************************
