Did he melt his laptop?

  • Thread starter Thread starter James E Middleton
  • Start date Start date
J

James E Middleton

Fujitsu - Biblo MG70J

Centrino 1.7 RAM 512

One of my co-workers was converting large .avi files to mpeg2 on his laptop.
Setup a 6GB .avi to encode and left the computer unattended for a few hours.

When he came back, the laptop was dead... still is for that matter.

The battery that is in the computer is charged, power cable seems to be OK,
but no way to test it now.

When we press 'power' nothing happens; no lights in the LCD, no HDD spin, no
beeps, nothing.

Could the load from converting the .avi files overheated the computer?

*Usually, when the encoding program is run, it causes the computer we
normally use, desktops with P4 2.8 to run at full load for hours at a time.*

Just seems coincidental, but I can't think of anything else...
 
James E Middleton said:
Fujitsu - Biblo MG70J

Centrino 1.7 RAM 512

One of my co-workers was converting large .avi files to mpeg2 on his
laptop. Setup a 6GB .avi to encode and left the computer unattended for a
few hours.

When he came back, the laptop was dead... still is for that matter.

The battery that is in the computer is charged, power cable seems to be
OK, but no way to test it now.

When we press 'power' nothing happens; no lights in the LCD, no HDD spin,
no beeps, nothing.

Could the load from converting the .avi files overheated the computer?

*Usually, when the encoding program is run, it causes the computer we
normally use, desktops with P4 2.8 to run at full load for hours at a
time.*

Just seems coincidental, but I can't think of anything else...
Click to expand...

James:

Was the laptop running from battery power for the conversion? How do you
know it's now charged? Did you find that out by putting it in a different
laptop? Try putting a new battery in, or if you don't have one, try
removing it and just using cable. I've heard of the battery dying and
needing to be removed and run straight from cable until replacement brick
shows up. This was a while ago, but the technology and route power follows
might not have changed much.

Any machine I know of built since '95 typically has some sort of emergency
power down to shut everything off before actual harm comes to hardware in
overheating scenarios. Not all of them have the same procedure to reset,
though. Some need contact points on the mobo connected, some need CMOS
battery taken out/put back in, some need jumper reset on mobo, blah blah.
Check the manual for that laptop model for details of emergency shutdown, or
whatever they might call it. If the laptop has no details, try the manual
of the motherboard (usually online at mfg. website somewhere).

HTH
 
In a panic I shot the last post off, with some logical assumptions.

The laptop was running from a power cable when this happened.

The battery was, and always is in the laptop, so it remains charged.

He returned to the office about 3 hours after he started the encoding and
left.

Running from a power supply, what shut the computer down?

Did the computer overheat?

If the battery in the computer is always there and charged, why no power?

SO!!!!

What if the power supply just died?

Maybe it's a bad power supply?

He left the office with the laptop running from the power supply (cable and
brick), the power supply dies, the laptop shifts to battery power, it runs
off the battery until it dies.

No one is there to see a low batter warning, in which case we'd be able to
say, 'Hey, it's plugged in and the battery is going to die, power supply
must be dead!'

We come back and the laptop is completely dead.

No lights in the LCD panel, it's plugged in, the battery should be OK...

Maybe the meltdown idea is a bit off; a machine should shut down before that
happens...

For now, we'll keep our fingers crossed for a faulty power supply.

Thanks for your response, we'll dig out the manual and look for some reset
procedures if that happens to be the case.
 
Power supply is no good, or about to die...

Ran through the scenario again.... what could have happened.....?

Plugged, unplugged, checked connections, pushed buttons, etc...

Half jokingly, I rapped on the power supply a few times with my knuckles....

Power!

Yeah!!!!

He's of to the computer shop for a replacement...


Thanks...
 
James said:
Power supply is no good, or about to die...

Ran through the scenario again.... what could have happened.....?

Plugged, unplugged, checked connections, pushed buttons, etc...

Half jokingly, I rapped on the power supply a few times with my knuckles....

Power!

Yeah!!!!

He's of to the computer shop for a replacement...
Click to expand...

In situations like this involving laptops, it would not be
surprising that the external power supply dies. But take
note that when it does so, the laptop can continue to run
until its battery runs down, resulting in no function at all.
 
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