EasyLinuxGuide Blog

So I’ve been asked lately a lot why every time someone asks what I am up to, I say “working on the laptop”. This Emachine laptop has wrangled so much time away from me lately because of numerous issues. I was over at a co-worker’s place and happened to mention that I had considered getting a newer laptop to replace my aging but very stable Thinkpad and next thing I knew I was carrying out this emachine to see it could suit my needs and if so, there may be a sale.

The Diagnostic

I probably won’t recall all of the details but I will provide some information on what has preoccupied me for the last several days. One of the first things I did was a Google search on the issue that had apparently plagued this machine for about 2 years or more and caused frustration to its owner and others who had tried to fix it. My first Google search produced that originally there had been a class action suit against the makers of Emachines for rampant overheating issues. The end result was compensation offered on 3 tiers depending on how many times the unit had been unsuccessfully repaired or you could choose a repair. By the time I got the laptop it was about a week and a half past the due date to apply for this restitution. I advised the owner to call in anyway if desired to see if anything could be done.

The Repair

I did find a nice forum post on how to clean the internal fan which tended to alleviate the overheating issues for a lot of owners. It seemed fairly straightforward and since it was past its due date for the class action suit, I figured I might as well try it. The fan turned out to be quite dirty so once it was reassembled, it not only didn’t seem to get as hot, but also was quieter. The next day I was using the laptop while lying on my couch and I noticed the strangest thing. I was connected wired to my network and was talking to some friends on messenger and I noticed a very strange occurrence. When I pressed enter, my message would just stay where I typed it instead of going above to the body of the conversation. Then I instinctively picked up the laptop and was looking under it and such and when I returned to the screen I noticed my message had sent. I repeated this a few more times and noticed that the message would send almost immediately once I lifted it off my lap. So, something was still not right. I decided to do further testing. I ran the Maxtor Power Max Utility to test the drive which works on almost any manufacturer of hard drive. It came back with errors on several tests. Since I was given permission to erase the drive, I thought I would try a zero fill (low level format) which I have seen rescue several drives over the years – this failed also. I had never seen this test fail before. With the hard drive test not going well and the strange activity, I knew in order to eliminate some variables, the drive needed to be replaced. So off I went to my local computer store and managed to pick up a supposed 20Gb drive which actually turned out to be a 6Gb instead. I am keeping in mind while doing all of this work that I am trying to get this laptop into a condition to where I would be interested in buying it.

The Setup

Once I replaced the drive, things seemed much better. I used the laptop for quite a while with a nice trim Arch Linux install and it was working fine. I used it all day for probably about 14 hours off and on. At the end of the night, it mysteriously shut right now from out of nowhere. Was this due to overheating? Perhaps – the underside of the laptop was extremely hot. I knew the hard drive was not the issue. It could be in much better condition but still struggling to stay cool. More testing is needed. I did manage to get a moral victory tonight though – I got wireless working. It comes with a broadcom internal wireless card and used bcm4306 chipset which I loaded through ndiswrapper. I had tried ndiswrapper v. 1.26 the previous night and it would not pick up my access point. It was suggested to try the latest 1.28 version (thanks Brad!) and it went ahead and loaded up fine. It’s nice to have one less cord. It’s also nice to be able to have wireless working in the sense that it wasn’t a high priority due to all of the hardware issues which means that perhaps a lot of them have cleared up.

The (in)decision

All in all, it is a nice laptop with very decent specs. It was purchased about 3 years ago as a state of the art machine with a 15.4 widescreen (quite uncommon then), 20Gb hard drive, dvd rom and cd burner, internal wireless, 3 usb ports, modem, wired nic, firewire, 512mb ram (odd config – one 256 soldered on and a 256 added as there is only one ram slot and only upgradeable to a max of 768 – the upgrade would be worthwhile though) and the cpu is an AMD Athlon XP 2400 (1.8Ghz). It does run well, but I am still wavering on buying it. New laptops are very cheap these days and I don’t really need a new laptop by any means, I don’t need any computer related things to be honest, but if it is a decent deal and I get working, I may consider it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 7th, 2006 at 3:58 am and is filed under Linux, PC Work, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.