Compal HEL-80 won't post...

...and nobody is answering at Power Notebooks tech support number which is supposed to be 24x7.

It figures my three page English paper that I need today is on the laptop

The machine was working fine yesterday. Went to power it up this morning, and the lights come on, the DVDROM spins up, but nothing on the screen and you can tell it isnt booting.

It's under a week old

 

Give them another call and send an email at the same time. Hopefully you'll catch them.

Good luck getting this problem resolved. Hopefully you have a backup of your paper somewhere.

 

Go out and buy an external 2.5" SATA to USB converter locally and then get your files off the hard drive. You never know when you'll have some sort of problem like this again with this or another computer.

 

I know that with older model of laptops I had (around 5 years ago) I had computers that wouldn't post and one thing I would try that would work one out of a 100 times is to remove the battery, remove power cord, hold the power button down for a few minutes to discharge any remaining power and then replug everything. Other then that you can probably try to resocket your ram, That shouldn't void your warranty (or you d better check before doing it hehe). And also try to resocket the Hard Drive (although a computer should post evenwithout a hard drive). If that still doesn't fix it, Test the laptop with only 1 chip of ram. If that doesn't fix it send it to repairs....


Otto.

 

Strange that you didn't get anyone.. are you sure you dialed the right number? I know when I called it was pretty late at night.. I know basically nothing local would have been open then, and I'm in the same timezone as powernotebooks.

Get yourself a gmail account, then get either gmail drive.. or get firefox and get Gspace... use it to make your school work easily transportable.. plus, google does a great job with backups.. so its reliable.. and it will work more like a drive (or ftp depending on your case)... either way, you use one of the tools I mentioned to put in on, then as long as you can check your gmail account you can get access... (or install gmail drive or gspace on another machine to get it easier)

 

I called them when I got home from class. Donald (from here?) answered on the first ring

I tried a few things this morning. Taking out the battery/ac adapter. Taking out one of the memory modules and leaving one in, etc. Turns out I should have taken the 2nd module out and tried it again. It was the bad one.

It's an Nspire module (I had never heard of this brand). Go figure I questioned Ron about this when I bought HEL-80 and he said they don't use off name RAM because if they have problems, it'll end up costing them more money in the long run. Because of that I didn't pay the extra $$$ for the Crucial memory. Awe well, irony kicked me anyways Hopefully this is just a one time thing though.

He's sending a form I need to fill out, and they're going to advance ship me a new one.

I managed to get my English papers re-written today. I actually have an external HD kit coming for backups.

 

Glad to hear it all worked out for you in the end. I'm also glad to hear it was only a RAM card that failed, and not something more serious.

 

you and me both...it wouldn't have sat well if I would have had to send the entire unit back for warranty work being a week old.

But Donald took care of me.

I have to email back a signed form to do the cross ship, but I need to wait until my buddy can scan it for me. I don't have my scanner here.

 

Two Donald's. There is me, and then there is Donald at tech support...

I really can't explain why no one answered this morning...everyone was on duty and answering calls.

nSprire memory is our branded Elpida memory. Elpida is the largest and best memory maker in Japan...and their failure rate is actually lower than Corsair! However with memory, or hard drives, or any component there is a certain percentage failure rate.

Get that cross ship form faxed in to us and we will ship you the new piece 2nd Day Air...in the mean time you can keep going on the good piece

 

Thanks Donald. I emailed the form this evening after scanning it.

Apparently my dad's company is doing some research on laptops, so I sent him boss a good review of the HEL80 and power notebooks. I was impressed with the tech support today...and that says a lot.

 

Brianj, what email address did you send it to? We have not received it.

We also appreciate your good words to the boss...thank you!