Maybe 1 post per month is a very low activity for a personal blog, should I be more chatty? Ok, let's say so: car broken, a lot of money to make it work again but this is not hard to handle. The thing that is hard to handle is to accept that my laptop is old, and it started to stop working. Well, not exactly. It's hard to accept the fact that it indeed works still well, except for a small detail that makes it unworking most of the time. If the diagnosis is right, it is about the BIOS EPROM... CPU is ok. Hard disk is ok (good! no data loss for now), LCD works, fan spins, some keys is a little bit deaf but not too much, and I have an external usb keyboard... RAM is ok (I went from 256M to 1G, remember?), gfx card is ok... everything's ok, but that little piece, which decided to fool me (if the diagnosis is right, again).
It happened one day when instead of seeing the Acer logo screen, and then the Grub boot loader, a long annoying beep followed by two short beeps greeted me... What's up? A lot of BIOS says graphics card problems this way. But a deeper seek made me informed about the fact that 1L-2S is (should be!) a problem in the flash of the BIOS... Likely.
Somewhere I've found a solution: reflashing the ROM, twice or three times to be "safer", and everything should go... Not so for me (or this was not the problem...?) When luckly the PC started, after 20 or so attempt, I tried the procedure. It seemed ok for a while: turned off, restarted (after minutes), and it was ok. Hurrah... but then I waited longer and the problem showed itself again.
This time it took longer before a turn-on attempt was successful. Reflashed (using provided software) the Phoenix BIOS 1.15, ten times or so, but likely this won't solve... Now I am using the laptop, since I only rebooted between MS Windows and Ubuntu, never turned it off (yet...). And it's all ok. I know tomorrow it won't boot, I will try and try, and at some point I'll give up. And I will decide to buy a brand new laptop... In italian there's the slang local verb "rosicare"; it should exist a synonym I can then translate into english, but in this moment it comes not into my mind... it is the feeling you can taste e.g. when you are so close to a goal and then, suddenly, a small stupid detail goes wrong and you lose the goal.
My pre-euro-era laptop still works... except for that stupid detail that if fixed would make this piece of hardware last for many years still ... one year would be enough for me!
Useful post, isn't it?
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