PCA Forums

my laptop is behaving very bad latly. (bad boy......)
He shuts down when ever he likes to or doesnt even start up. It goes as far as "starting windows" then it just shuts of and restarts. when it restart all the way it tells me that my videodriver isnt installed properly and it will only show the desktop in 640X480 window. Reinstalled driver allready a few times, it works for a while and then does the same thing again.
Laptop is a Dell Inspiron 3800 running win ME videocard ATI M1 8 MB ram, RAM 384 MB, 40 HDD.
anybody a clue what could cause these problems? could it be a defect internal battery?

"must be all that folding I did, that screwed everything up "

Tried running scandisk or diskcheck? I'd also run ad aware if you can get that far.

That could be a lot of things. Heat, corrupted drivers, hardware going out, etc. Updated drivers/os? Might be time for the ole format c trick, unless someone has a solution.

did manage to run scandisk, adaware and norton antivirus. no luck so far. all the drivers are up to date. I'll wait with the c-format cause i almost start to think it is hardware related. now finding out what is a different story.

probably not the problem...but a bad battery can do this. some laptops will freak out if the battery is no longer charging correctly and it keeps switching between AC and battery power.

.02

does a laptop also have a onboard battery? anybody ever took a Dell 3800 Inspiron apart and could tell me where to look for it?

I tried running the computer without any drives or batteries in it. but still the same problem.

sounds like it might be a hdd issue - sometimes when they go bad they do all kinds of stuff, exp if it is intermittent - royally screws stuff up

well it seems like it was a bad memory chip. lost all the files i had on the drive, because i fdisked it and reinstalled windows a few times, and everytime the same thingt kept happening.
till one start up it gave me a error message "system memory has changed, restart system". it showed 128 mb less then there was supposed to be, so i took the 128mb strip out and now everything seems to work fine.
Should have tried that right from the start, wel next time i know.

damn... sorry I saw this post so late... I was going to tell you to check the RAM
too little too late I guess...glad it's working though