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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