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OK, so here's a question...
My sister has an Acer Aspire 5000 laptop. It used to work just fine, but
recently it has developed some disturbing symptoms - basically random
freezing.
The utterly weird thing is, it behaves perfectly under [several
different variants of] Linux, but continues to randomly freeze when
running under Windows. [I have reinstalled Windows several times now.
Interestingly, it always seems to hang at the same places in the
installation sequence.]
The symptoms:
- Laptop no longer responds to keyboard or mouse. (Mouse pointer won't
move, Ctrl+Alt+Del is no-op, the capslock light doesn't function when I
press the key, etc.)
- On every laptop known to man, holding down the power button will
forcibly power down the laptop. This does not work while the laptop is
frozen. (Fortunately the battery typically dies after ~5 minutes or so.)
- The laptop *does* respond to some things though. Unplugging the
Ethernet cable still pops up that retarded "a cable is unplugged" message.
- The fans seem to spin up while the laptop is hang, suggesting an
infinite loop in the software somewhere.
- I am reasonably sure the laptop is not overheating. It seems cold to
the touch, and it repeatedly hangs at *exactly* the point in Windows,
and has never done this even once under Linux.
- Repeated memory tests reveal no problems of any kind.
- I have reinstalled Windows multiple times, without any Internet
access, so I'm downright certain it's not a virus or a software
configuration issue.
To reiterate, when the laptop was new, it had none of these issues.
(Although it was dissapointingly slow.)
Does anybody have the slightest clue what the *hell* is causing this
frustrating behaviour?
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