Laptop Problem

[Mafai]

I cant remember if I posted this already in the past, but I was thinking about my old laptop I want to fix....

I tried a new HDD and new RAM. neither fixed this...


memtest86 results...

http://lmxvii.net/mafai/memtest.jpg

trying to reinstall windows

http://lmxvii.net/mafai/xpinstall.jpg

Take notice the cases of characters are messed up in both screenies. If I gently tap the case, it goes back to normal, and doesn't hang until it happens again. If it switches back to this "mode", I can tap it again to revert it to normal.

The video card has also been reseated.

Any ideas?

[Cephius]

It's probably your motherboard. Really weird though.

[Mayareira]

Have you tried updating your BIOS(assuming that you are absolutely sure that it isn't a HDD problem)?

What about other OSs? You could download Ubuntu and install Linux to see if that works.

EDIT: oh, the tapping part...hmm, it could be related to an unseated piece.

[Mafai]

you know what, now that i think about it. I replaced the HDD and it still didnt work.... So i pulled it out and put the broken one back in.

Then I tested new RAM on it with the broken drive, maybe it was both the HDD and RAM?

This laptop came from an old guy at a veterans hospital, so he prly dropped it a bunch (altho i dont see any signs of that)

[Mayareira]

Water Damage generally causes weird shit like this as well. Might've caused an oxidation on your motherboard.
RAM errors would generally cause random reboots...never really seen them outputting random stuff like that.

You could try and remove HDD completely, load MS DOS from a floppy drive and try running some applications to see if it is HDD related or not.

[Mafai]

Yea no floppy drive on this... know of anything i could use on a flash drive of cd (i prefer this) to test?

[Mayareira]

Could just boot from CD and try windows installer, quit it and try applications on windows/other CD's.

[Mafai]

oddly the setup doesnt ever act up until the setup is copying files stage (if i remember correctly), which does seem like its the HDD... But I know it did it with a new HDD, unless it was DOA