Posted on 12/14/2009 12:05:45 PM PST by Lady Jag
Interesting how laptops got bigger and then got smaller than ever. Obviously they saw a niche between laptops and wi-fi phones.
Those darn Broadcom wireless cards.
If you have another keyboard you might want to try it on the machine.
You never know what's going to foul up the works. Back around 99 or 00 my company (finally) switched from the clackity old IBM terminals to a batch of shiny new Dell PCs. About a week into it our service manager's PC froze and he didn't know what to do. Our IT guy was 100 miles away at the main store, and it's not my trade but since I was known to have the most knowledge among those in the store, I was called upon to solve the problem.
By the time I got to his desk there was a column of smoke rising out of.... his mouse. Never saw a mouse go out in flames before or since, but that was the primary failure and a replacement mouse got everything working fine.
I run WinXP and Fedora Linux on mine, and some people even run Mac OS-X on them - so they are quite capable.
What wi-fi service do you use with the netbook?
May not be dead:
i had something like that happen on my brother's computer. The drive wasn't dead. His idiot kid had let the computer run during a thunderstorm. Apparently there was a surge that wiped his partition information.
i booted the computer with a Knoppix Linux DVD, and IT couldn't find the Windows partition on the hard drive.
i ended up having to re-install the entire operating system from the restore partition, which was undamaged.
It may just be that your master boot record got nuked. Does your computer have a floppy drive?
If so, you could possibly run DOS and do an fdisk\mbr (check the syntax of the command on your own, it's been decades since i used DOS) operation on the hard drive.
That might bring it back up.
Try one more thing. You may have a bad RAM Chip. I’ve seen it stop a boot up in older computers and give a BSD. Remove all RAM Chips but one and try the machine. If it boots and loads you have a bad chip. If it doesn’t boot swap the one you took out with the one still in and try again. I had a bad RAM chip on one about drive me nuts. When it finally died I found the problem. THis might at least let it run enough to rescue your fills. If it does load just keep programs open at a minimal.
My ping list got a bit long & I missed your post. Some of the 3g & 4g wireless companies are bundling contracts with a discounted netbook, and those units will have their extra internal PCI slot populated with the company's modem - but I'm not doing anything like that. Just the standard built in 802.11g wireless card and whatever it can reach. Of course the home router is no problem, and same with darn near any hotel, lots of restaurants, or just free riding on whatever open network that can be found. If there's no network available I have a collection of ebooks, some favorite music, and usually a couple of movies stored on the drive, plus some work that can be done offline.
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