There’s some kind of laptop voodoo going on in this house.

My Acer netbook has been deader than a doorknob for the past 2 or 3 months. Shelly was using it and, apparently it just turned itself off and that was that. I tried everything that I could think of: tried running it without the battery installed, running without any accessible internal cards removed, running with the hard drive removed… nada. Absolutely no lights would illuminate on the thing, not even the battery-charging LED.

And the likely culprit given these symptoms – the mainboard – would be as much to replace as the computer was worth.

Now, I don’t know if I ever wrote about it, but my previous Dell laptop also suffered a similar power-related illness, only to revive itself after some time. That laptop got itself to a point where it shut itself off, and trying to power it back on would illuminate the power LED for a few seconds, followed by an audible click, and the LED would extinguish. What followed was a complete teardown and rebuild, but the problem persisted until…

…one day the laptop just started working again of its own accord.

Eventually it started acting up again with its old shenanigans, but the point is that it too exhibited power issues long before this netbook was ever conceived.

Also of interest is that, around the time of this first odd behaviour of my Dell laptop, my alarm clock also had interesting fits of display hieroglyphics… only to go back to normal around the time the Dell “fixed” itself.

Now, my immediate thought at the time was some sort of voltage issue with the house mains. And yet, nothing else was exhibiting problems. And even with the most recent incident involving the netbook, the power was disconnected when Shelly was using it.

Which isn’t to say that there wasn’t some previous power-related damage which finally caused the machine to give up the ghost. But… how do you explain its current resurrection?

So I’m at a loss. And the next question is, will the netbook give up the ghost again? Time will tell I suppose.