How I spent my day...
So much for plans. citabria got up early to do some things with her laptop and by time I was up, it had gone south. Specifically, the video seems to have gone futzy. Hooking up an external monitor doesn't help--it sees no signal once it goes black. On restarting after a hard shutdown, the boot screen comes up and XP loading screen, but often with vertical dashed or dotted lines, then it will black out again.
Now, I did get it to boot in safe mode once--still trying to force that again--and it stayed up long enough, with no funny lines, even, for citabria to back up files. I have been repairing XP on it and I think it made it through but, again, the screen goes black. (And, her system is a little pokey for other reasons, so it takes a while.)
However, it really smells like a hardware problem and Googling suggests more drastic methods that are beyond my capabilities.
I'm trying one more reboot but if it blacks out again, I need to think about where to get it repaired. (It's out of warranty.) We don't have a real third PC in the house, so I'm going to share mine with her tomorrow at least. Grr. Arr.
Now, I did get it to boot in safe mode once--still trying to force that again--and it stayed up long enough, with no funny lines, even, for citabria to back up files. I have been repairing XP on it and I think it made it through but, again, the screen goes black. (And, her system is a little pokey for other reasons, so it takes a while.)
However, it really smells like a hardware problem and Googling suggests more drastic methods that are beyond my capabilities.
I'm trying one more reboot but if it blacks out again, I need to think about where to get it repaired. (It's out of warranty.) We don't have a real third PC in the house, so I'm going to share mine with her tomorrow at least. Grr. Arr.