Laptop will not start

This is one call that I get at least once a week. The problem though is that I don't generally make any money out of it. The client says that when they press the on button on their notebook nothing happens. No lights or fan noise or the laptop may briefly start up and then stop.

The usual advice I give is to unplug the laptop from the power. Turn the computer over and remove the battery. Most laptops have sliders to unlock the battery allow its removal. Turn the laptop the rightside up and press and hold the on button for 60 seconds. They reason we do this is that even when off for awhile some internal components in the laptop store power. Holding the on button will totally drain power from the laptop. This will cause a corrupt BIOS configuration to be reset.

After the sixty second. plug in the power and try again. If you are lucky the laptop will boot. Another possibility is that the power adapter has failed. Unfortunately to test this you will need a multimeter although you can buy a cheap multimeter for under $20 in hardware stores.

To test the adapter plug it in to the power point. Set the multimeter to Volts and then put one probe on the outside and the other probe on the inside of the metal cylinder that plugs into the laptop. It should read somewhere between 16 to 19Volts. If it doesn't register then you can buy a replacement adapter and you are back in business.

Cheap Vista Laptops

I had a customer today ring up about cheap laptops. They were $600 and she wanted to see if I could match the price. The computers were celeron M processors with 512Mb of memory running Vista Home Basic. Hardly the fastest machines, in fact running them would be downright unpleasant.
I think that the minimum for a Vista laptop would be a T2*** cpu with at least 1Gb of memory. I'm writing this in an IBM Thinkpad with a T7250 cpu and 2 Gb of memory and Vista isn't the quickest. We forget how large the operating systems are getting. I have a Pentium III in the workshop running Windows 98 and 256Mb of memory and it starts up within 30 seconds and is extremely quick.
talking about Laptops I didn't like the Thinkpad at first as I have been selling ASUS laptops. The ASUS are extremely stylish while the Thinkpad is very square. However, after using one for a little while, I find I like the keypad and you get the feeling that you could throw the machine across the room and it wouldn't break.