Dell Laptop On/Off question

I need a laptop to give presentations and a friend wants to sell me her Dell laptop. She doesn't know what model of Dell it is other than it is 'high end' and is a couple of years old. She does digital pictures with it, etc. She said the only problem with it is it will not turn off. She has to pull the battery to turn it off. I'm assuming that she is trying to use the start button to power down and I don't know if she uses the cntl/alt/delete method. Has anyone heard of this problem with Dell laptops? Is it easily fixed? Thanks.

 

i've never heard of any problem like that for any notebook before

 

hold the power button down until the notebook turns off.


if all you're doing is presentations (powerpoint?) you can buy a new dell bottom-of-the-line laptop for 500ish. depending on how much you're buying the used notebook for, you may just look at a new notebook that isn't maxed out spec wise.

 

You could take a look and see what is running in the background. Something there might be causing it. A fresh install of windows will tell you if it is hardware or software. I'd agree with drumfu, you can get a decent new laptop pretty cheap. I would look at the deals section on the frontpage. Plus if you buy new, you get a warranty. Good Luck.

 

Thanks for the information and help. I'm actually looking at a new Dell but I thought I'd give this a shot first. I'm supposed to get it sometime this week, hopefully this morning, I go from there.

 

My friend just brought me the computer. It is a Dell Inspiron 2650 with Windows XP Home SP2 with a 1.8 GHz processor, 128mb RAM, 20GB harddrive. I got it to power down using the alt/ctrl/delete route. Everything seems to work OK. Any ideas what I should give for it? My friend said she would take $150. Thanks.

 

Sounds fair. I would put in a faster hard drive and bump it up to 512MB of memory.

 

Done deal. Brought it home tonight. Everything runs great. Powers down correctly - I don't know why the seller said that it would not power down correctly . I think her newest laptop powers down quickly and maybe she was not waiting long enough. The only thing that I plan to do to is add more RAM and possibly a woreless card for my airport travels. Is adding RAM very difficult to this model? It was suggested that I increase to 512 mB. I have no owners manual so I assuming there are 2 slots for RAM - one with 128 presently and the other port empty? Thanks for the help.