# My Gateway laptop is dead?



## tonyvdb (Sep 5, 2007)

My wife and I bought a Gateway laptop about 3 years ago and it gets used everyday for at least 4 hrs a day. Tuesday it started acting up and was running really slow and when I tried to run AVG to see if it was a virus it stalled about halfway through the scan. It also did the same thing when trying to run Spybot search and destroy. I finaly gave up and tried to do a defrag of the hard drive and scan for errors both locked up as well. Last night it stopped booting into windows and said that the windows 32 something or other was damaged and a recovery would need to be done. so I went ahead and tried to do the recovery using the Gatway recovery DVD that came with the laptop to no avail so i finally just formatted the hard drive and did a fresh install but it now just stops about halfway through the install and reboots and never goes any farther.
Do you think my hard drive is toast?


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## Harpmaker (Oct 28, 2007)

A hard drive going south would be my first guess Tony. You could try hooking it up to another computer as a USB drive and check it out that way, or just get another drive for the laptop; it's probably time to do that anyway.

I'm actually in a similar situation with my current desktop; I've had a Maxtor internal IDE drive in that machine that has been running 24/7 (minus power outages and maintenance) for about four years. The drive is showing no signs of imminent failure, but many times they don't - they just die.

We, or at lest I, get so used to the dependability of PC's that I tend to forget they are mechanical devices as well as electronic, and as such they DO wear out.


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## tonyvdb (Sep 5, 2007)

Harpmaker said:


> A hard drive going south would be my first guess Tony.


Thanks, thats kind of my thought as well, I'm just not sure if I'm wasting money on a new drive given the amount of use the laptop gets and maybe I should just replace it with a new laptop. We really only use it for internet browsing mainly the Shack, ebay and my wife uses it allot for Facebook stuff.
We originaly bought it so our kids could watch DVDs on it during long trips in the van rather than just buying a portable DVD player but only used it once for that purpose.


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## Mike P. (Apr 6, 2007)

I had this experience with a laptop a few years ago. The problem was a bad ram chip. My laptop had two ram chips, I tried them one at a time until the laptop worked. I put the second chip in and the problem started over again. It might be worth a shot for you to try the same thing. You never know.


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## Harpmaker (Oct 28, 2007)

tonyvdb said:


> Thanks, thats kind of my thought as well, I'm just not sure if I'm wasting money on a new drive given the amount of use the laptop gets and maybe I should just replace it with a new laptop. We really only use it for internet browsing mainly the Shack, ebay and my wife uses it allot for Facebook stuff.
> We originaly bought it so our kids could watch DVDs on it during long trips in the van rather than just buying a portable DVD player but only used it once for that purpose.


Something to keep in mind is that if you get a new laptop it will almost certainly be running Vista. IMO, Vista still isn't ready for prime-time, and is chock full of DRM to boot. It's also getting harder and harder to put XP on new machines due to driver issues.

In case you're interested, Newegg is currently selling a 40GB Seagate IDE notebook drive for $39.99 with free shipping.

Interesting tidbit about bad RAM causing problems Mike. That jogged my memory; several years ago a friend of mine had a laptop that slowed way down and got to the point where about every 30 seconds the machine would freeze up for 1/2 second or so. I worked on that thing for hours trying to find a virus on it, and just gave up and reformatted the thing and ran the recovery disc. It still had the same problem!!! I ran a Linux-based "liveCD" and it worked fine!

Bottom line is that it was because the battery was dead!!! The laptop was always used from a 110 VAC source so I never even thought of the battery. What was happening is that the laptop was polling the battery for charge status and getting confused about it being totally dead. Come to think of it, I believe that was a Gateway laptop as well.


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## Sonnie (Apr 11, 2006)

I have no idea what I would do without my laptop... other than just plain ole without. My wife says I am married to it. :whistling:

I have a Fujitsu 6420 and the letters on the keys are warn off. I talkype too much. :blink:

My next one will be a Sager 5796 ... probably from xoticpc.com ... and probably soon.


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## tonyvdb (Sep 5, 2007)

Mike P. said:


> The problem was a bad ram chip. My laptop had two ram chips, I tried them one at a time until the laptop worked. I put the second chip in and the problem started over again. It might be worth a shot for you to try the same thing. You never know.


Good Idea Mike, I will try that tonight.:T


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## tonyvdb (Sep 5, 2007)

Laptops are so cheep now a days. I can get a decent one for under $550 for what we use it for thats good enough. I use my desktop for playing games and such so the laptop doesn't need allot of horsepower.


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## Guest (Nov 14, 2008)

tonyvdb said:


> My wife and I bought a Gateway laptop about 3 years ago and it gets used everyday for at least 4 hrs a day. Tuesday it started acting up and was running really slow and when I tried to run AVG to see if it was a virus it stalled about halfway through the scan. It also did the same thing when trying to run Spybot search and destroy. I finaly gave up and tried to do a defrag of the hard drive and scan for errors both locked up as well. Last night it stopped booting into windows and said that the windows 32 something or other was damaged and a recovery would need to be done. so I went ahead and tried to do the recovery using the Gatway recovery DVD that came with the laptop to no avail so i finally just formatted the hard drive and did a fresh install but it now just stops about halfway through the install and reboots and never goes any farther.
> Do you think my hard drive is toast?



hate to say it Tony, but that harddrive sounds like toast...it sounds like it has some unreadable sectors.
i'd suggest using a live linux distro to salvage what ya can, but that is pointless after a format.
laptops get a lot of abuse, so 3 years isn't a bad life span...i've had new harddrives fail out of the box.
best bet, hate to say it, is get a new one.
peace
jimi


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## tonyvdb (Sep 5, 2007)

Yup, it was the hard drive. I put in a smaller 40gb drive I had lying around and its working fine.


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## Jaminschipper (Feb 1, 2009)

I didnt even read anything but the title and I can tell you what ur prob is....you bought a Gateway.......lol sorry j/k, not really tho =P


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