About-Face & Walking Backwards

[tirlasutaa]

Recently the question of why I don't want to be a computer geek anymore has again surfaced. The tech where I took dad's laptop recently got me to thinking about reversing my position on the matter. Good luck.

Sitting next to me is my father's (relatively new) Fujitsu Lifebook T4020D, a large paperweight. Thus far the screen "went out" & after multiple trips (two hour drive each way) to the local "official" repair technician, it has a new processor. Why it was the processor, no one knows. External monitor use worked fine, but the actual lcd wouldn't. That was two visits to get fixed. Now that it's been about a two weeks since the repair & the thing is getting loads of other errors/issues.

• Windows XP on boot, irq_not_equal... error
• Windows XP on boot, STOP: C0000221 unknown hard error ntdll.dll
• Windows XP, last known good config, safe mode, etc. will not boot, locks up, see above
• Windows XP on boot, locks on boot w/o error
• Windows XP install CD, locks during hardware detection
• Windows XP install CD, recovery console can't be used -- no harddrive detected
• Gentoo Linux boot CD, locks right after /proc
• Gentoo Linux boot CD, locks before /proc
• Gentoo Linux boot CD, crc error while uncompressing Linux
• Gentoo Linux boot CD, Memtest86+ v1.51 locks during test #4 & says it is finding lots of errors

I have to wonder if this is due to something larger being wrong to begin with or if something was perhaps "nudged" into breaking during the previous repair. I can't get the data off a computer that won't boot anything... At least I've got a copy (ok, I copied the whole damned harddrive) of the data from 2006-12-12, but I'd've liked to get the data since then.

If anyone has a suggestion on what I should try next, shoot. Just remember that I cannot play with the inners because of the warranty on the machine.