Enlisting a little thermal help...

A short and sweet post today..

Came into work this morning to one of our developers having a bit of trouble with her Dell Inspiron 9300 laptop. She had been having problems before getting the thing to complete its BIOS post and start booting windows XP. In this case it would either halt dead before the little message to press F2 for setup or F12 for boot menu appears in the upper right corner of the screen. It may also display that message but halt shortly afterwards. Her fix for this in the past was to turn it off and try again. This had always eventually worked until this morning where for her life it would simply not boot.

Of course she needed to get the thing to boot so she could check some things into source control, and get some documents off that she had been working on. All tasks that are just a hell of a lot easier if you can get the windows environment to boot up just one more time....

In helping her I tried all the standard sorts of things like taking the battery out. Trying it on battery power alone. Disconnecting the docking ports, reconnecting the docking ports, pentagram chalk and white candles. All to no avail. Then I remembered my younger days as a board level repair technician using thermal spray to blast freeze chips one at a time in the face of an overheating problem with the simple computers of the time. (One step above beads on some strings). So I unplugged the laptop from everything and after some quick re-arranging of what were dubious contents in the company chill chest/ice machine, I placed the laptop in the deep freeze for about 10 mins. (Just enough time to get some Coffee)

On taking it out I quickly hooked it up enough to turn it on and it booted just fine.

She thinks I am a genius.. In reality I am just OLD but still have a memory...

Now she can get her stuff of the slowly expiring machine and we can call Dell and get it fixed...