2009-05-27

The fundamental interconnectedness of all things

It seems when my son is admitted to the hospital, my laptop reveals a new problem.

Now, my HP Pavilion tx1420us is failing to power on after any kind of software shutdown state. This includes: failing to resume from sleep, failing to power on after hibernate, and failing to power on after shutting down from the menu.

Fortunately, I'm able to get around this by shutting it down with the hardware switch. When I power up the computer and notice it's not starting (the audio and wireless lights both remain orange instead of turning blue, there is no disk activity, and the screen remains dark), I can press and hold the power switch in the "off" position for a few seconds until the system shuts off, and then power it back on. Sometimes, though, I have to do this twice.

Also fortunately, I'm using the Windows 7 RC, and Windows 7 includes a feature called "hybrid sleep". The short of this is, when the system goes to sleep, it also writes the hibernation file; so even though I can't wake it up and have to force the power off and wipe out the sleep state in memory, when I power it up it is able to resume from hibernation.

This could indicate that the wireless failure was not directly a fault between the system and the Wi-Fi card, but just a symptom of a general failure.

More so, though, I see this as a failure on my part for trusting HP to produce a laptop that would last beyond its warranty period.

2 comments:

Spencer said...

I gotta say, that's an incredibly strange bug. Why would software shutdowns behave any differently than the hardware switch?

bookladydavina said...

i see that you have caved and joined facebook and twitter and such... my hubby likes last fm, i figure i've already got more music on the hard drive then i know what to do with so haven't poked at it too much yet, cept when he sends me links.. and have thus far merely gazed at twitter.. i have a hard enough time coming up with updates for myspace and facebook to try that yet.. but.. look me up on facebook.. my name's a lot less common then yours :) there's a whole bunch of us ole irc bums lurking on there...