Last night when I logged off and went upstairs my wife was sitting there just staring at her laptop. It was off, for about the 10th time according to her. Of course I didn't know anything was going on. She said it just keeps shutting down. I put my hand on it. It was extremely hot. I hit the power button and within 15 seconds it turned back off. I turned it over, the intake for the fan had some dust on it but nothing extreme. I got the vacuum out and cleaned that. We let it set for about 30 mins, same thing. 15-20 seconds it was back off. We just decided to let it sit overnight to cool off. This morning it ran through startup, desktop began to appear and poof, off again. The area where the CPU is was very hot again. It had only been on maybe 90 seconds.
Since she needs this for her small business, she was freaking. She had orders that needed to be shipped today. No way to print shipping labels or postage. We only have one working printer in the house (I know, go buy some ink for the others). She did get on one of the other computers to get shipping addresses and what not and actually had to hand write labels AND go to the Post Office to ship the packages.
This laptop is 5-6 years old and a cheapie model. We just put almost $200 in it with a new power supply and battery and RAM, so I was not going to try to get it repaired. I picked up a new one today at lunch. Skipped out early this afternoon and got home to get it going. That all went well. She's back online, email and printing. I'll need to retrieve some files from the old one when I get a 2.5" external enclosure for the HDD as I don't think it's a HDD failure.
Now I may try to resurrect the old one some day. But for now she is happy. It sucks, how much these things run our lives. But I will also "try" to do backups better if she'd just shut the damned thing down once in a while.
Since she needs this for her small business, she was freaking. She had orders that needed to be shipped today. No way to print shipping labels or postage. We only have one working printer in the house (I know, go buy some ink for the others). She did get on one of the other computers to get shipping addresses and what not and actually had to hand write labels AND go to the Post Office to ship the packages.
This laptop is 5-6 years old and a cheapie model. We just put almost $200 in it with a new power supply and battery and RAM, so I was not going to try to get it repaired. I picked up a new one today at lunch. Skipped out early this afternoon and got home to get it going. That all went well. She's back online, email and printing. I'll need to retrieve some files from the old one when I get a 2.5" external enclosure for the HDD as I don't think it's a HDD failure.
Now I may try to resurrect the old one some day. But for now she is happy. It sucks, how much these things run our lives. But I will also "try" to do backups better if she'd just shut the damned thing down once in a while.