Laptop Died

[greenpenguin]

I have a rather old laptop - an IBM thinkpad 340CSE (for an idea of how old it is, it has a 200MB hard drive). Until recently it's been fairly happily running Linux. However, yesterday, I bought a serial cable, and connected it to my computer (both plugged in and turned off) and pressed power on the laptop, and... nothing happened. I unplugged everything, and tried again, same. I took the laptop to bits looking for any problems and put it back together, and the same thing happened.

By "nothing happened": all the indicator lights flash on as normal, leaving just the battery light and the hard drive light on, and something chugs - possibly the floppy drive. After that, nothing - the screen stays blank, the hard drive makes no noise. Connecting the laptop to an external screen, nothing appears on the screen.

Any suggestions welcome, I'm all out of ideas and I can't find any more Ms to RTF

Thanks

[bigtomrodney]

How old is it exactly? I heard rather terrible news recently, that transistors oxidise and become unreliable after 10 years to the point of failure.

This was the worst news ever. I haven't had the heart to power up my C64 since

On the other hand it sounds like a motherboard problem.

[greenpenguin]

It's probably more than 10 years old actually (it had windows 3.1 on it originally), so it could well be a motherboard problem. I was hoping there would be another reason, I don't want to throw it away...

[bigtomrodney]

For what it's worth I hope it's not the motherboard too

[greenpenguin]

Heh, thanks. I think it is the motherboard though, it really has died. I guess I'll have to just use it for parts.

[Agent-X]

Try replacing some basics, such as the powersupply and the CPU. Also replace the floppy if it's giving some problems. From there, try using a floppy disk version of Linux to see if it's all working.

*thinks 15 minutes later or so*

Oh yeah, you probably can't do that.... it's a laptop........... ellipses