So, heres the deal:

I turned my laptop on after a small low impact collision onto a towel on my floor, after a drop of about 2 inches (max).
I got nothing, the power light came on, but it didnt boot up and the screen didn't turn on either. I tried using an external monitor and mouse but they didn't help at all. No beep, no input or output whatsoever.

My guess was my hard drive disconnected from the bump, which would clearly stop windows from booting up.
If that was the case though, what about BIOS, and why wasn't the screen (or the rest) working?

In the end I prayed to my local deity and low and behold I'm back in working order, no lie! 

   
     Any intelligent guesses welcome!


I balence my laptop on two 25pk DVD spindles, big flat circular, leaving enough room underneath for awesome airflow.
The spindles were sat on a large hardback book on a flat surface, roughly bigger than my laptop itself.
In both theory and practice, it works 90% of the time, the 10% giving that the shiny smooth bottom of the laptop and the shiny smooth small surfaces of the spindle cases dont give much grip.

Guesses about why it works again? Or about what broke?

Quote from: Seriy on January 14, 2010, 10:13:49 PM
Guesses about why it works again? Or about what broke?

Both!

Eh, you said it yourself - a loose contact. Probably not the hard drive, seeing as the BIOS ROM isn't stored there. Just moving it around a little could easily have it fall back in place, which is probably why it works again.

If my mental image of how you use your computer is correct, it doesn't look at all safe.

Maybe the fall jostled some contacts somewhere, maybe even the processor. I would think it would beep tho.

I've never managed to recreate the events of that night since. 

I did however find myself infected with the Alureon rootkit, activated by last tuesdays windows 32bit security update. At first it said I had no system restore points, but after some advanced windows recovery HDD scans there was one right before the security update; half a day before, right when the problem started lol.

Was that for Windows Vista, that update? 'cause I get tired of my computer telling me to update windows and crap and I'm looking for any excuse to turn that damn function off.   

Quote from: FallenStar on February 22, 2010, 08:36:08 AM
Was that for Windows Vista, that update? 'cause I get tired of my computer telling me to update windows and crap and I'm looking for any excuse to turn that damn function off.   

I turned all updates off using the windows security center, or the firewall or defender or whatever, but I still got this one for some reason. I know I got it, cause the system restore point was there when I went to restore it.

Tricksy vista going behind my back like that...one of these days...