From: Andrew Scott Beals (bandy_at_ricochet.net)
Date: Fri Mar 31 2000 - 20:04:11 EST
I've had a problem similar to Stuart's with my 770ED. In my case, the tech on
the other end almost immediately said "inverter board", which made lots of
sense. EasyServ got it back to me in less than half the time they had quoted
[one week, instead of 10-14 biz days]. It has seen serious use for nearly two
years now, and I hope I get another 18 months or so use out of it. But any
more mysterious "lcd backlight goes off" problems and it's back to EasyServ,
and I'm sure it will come back just fine. In this case, it seems as if the
driver circuitry for the LCD is too close to its max output level, so they
simply wear out over time due to component failures. Switching power supplies
do go bad with time, but 20 months time is way too short of a working lifespan.
The customer in the story could have made a non-obvious mark on his hard drive
[not its holder!] so he could have told if it were replaced.
His problem with having to scandisk after a normal shutdown is something that
is endemic to some compaq models running w98. Compaq can't fix it, some
machines do it, some don't. My wife's machine does it, my daughter's doesn't.
If you look on their support forums, you'll find a significant number of folks
complaining, and no solution from compaq forthcoming.
But you have to ask yourself, why did MICROS~1 add the option to the system
configuration utility to "Disable Scandisk after bad shutdown" as well as
"disable fast shutdown"???
My theory is that they don't flush the disk buffers and let the writes finish
before they yank power to the drive, so the "I got Shutdown OK" bit didn't get
set on the drive, triggering the behaviour.
I've also had "Won't shutdown" problems with W95 due to brain-damaged "y2k
compliance" s/w my employer forced onto my machine when I logged into the
company's NT servers. Remove the culprit software and it shuts down just fine,
but they had hidden the startup deep within the registry - so far that it was
easier to simply rename/delete the offending program's directories and leave it
at that.
As to Stuart's problems with NT drivers, isn't it obvious that NT is the
redheaded stepchild of the laptops world? Heck, I'd love to run FreeBSD on my
ThinkPad, but the software support for the DVD drive just isn't there, not to
mention proper syncing support + playmate applications for my Palm. So I live
with W98 [née W95] and occasionally hurl invective at Redmond. But, just as
with my Palm, if software consistently screws things up, it either gets
removed, or run by itself followed by a reboot.
andy
9549-5au
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