Old hardware

Boo hoo. My vintage '08 laptop died. It was branded eMachines D620,
but its heritage was Gateway acquired by Acer '07, and the name was dc/d
about 6 y later. Its hardware was a mobile Athlon 2650e, 2G ram incl
the Radeon graphics, 160G hdd, optical and ethernet in add'n to the
wifi. Cheap hardware purchased on sale running Vista.

It was my first laptop, all previous machines having been desktops, but
I wanted something for travel. Over the years it later got an
experimental Win7 installed which ran fine, and typically it ran various
linux distros from USB as live persistent.

I haven't toted it around for years. Nowadays my travel devices are a
chromebook, Blu android smartphone (no plan), and a ZTE clamshell
feature phone running some linux deriv.

It looks like something went south w/ the power; blackscreen, no bios,
AC will charge the battery (sometimes) but the power indication comes on
very 'erratically' (or not at all) and I don't think the hdd spins up.

Of some interest, there's a YouTube vid (I normally HATE vids) which
appears to show similar symptoms. The vid tech disassembles the
machine, multimeter determines that the power button contacts need
resoldering and does, reassembles with successful outcome.

I don't think I really want to do all that for this old laptop, but I
haven't completely ruled it out.


--
Mike Easter
x-posted to alt.comp.hardware