Son's at uni & laptop just died. Any suggestions welcome please.

bluedog

Thank you very much for your replies everyone.

Teddyrukspin - Oooops Lol! DS is very much alive although I reckon he may have thought his world ended with his laptop conking out!!


4743hudsonj - Lol at this too, but no, he's not my son. I appreciate your thoughts on it, and without going into any detail, we've had a tough year and I know the thought wouldn't cross his mind in that way because of it. I think it was more a case of he wanted a working laptop and he wanted it NOW.........

Oneday77 - No worries regarding the party time suggestion. He's in private digs (got a better deal the the uni offered .. :eek:) so no party and as he's not a big drinker, I was thinking along the lines of possible damage from TEA spillage, lol.

After a lengthy chat last night, including telling him suggestions from here, he's calmed down and realised it makes more sense to try to sort it out first (and then look into getting a new one if need be, but only after properly researching it in MSE style of course .) He's apparently backed up all his work apart from the bits for his presentation - lesson learnt! He's looking up somewhere to take it to be looked today - phew!!

I think I've got a clearer picture about it too - it is showing hints of life as the power light does come on afterall. I'm not sure if this happened as he was using it or when booting up, but he got the dreaded blue screen with a message that read along the lines of it had suffered a problem and to re-boot it for protection. He did this and then had absolutely nothing on the screen. When I first spoke to him, the cd drawer wouldn't open so we couldn't try the recovery disc or programme installation disc that he's got either. He managed to get the drawer open as we spoke the second time. The light for that came on when it opened but nothing happened when he'd put the disc in, no sound or anything and the only light on was the power light.

He only uses it in his digs and keeps it plugged so will talk him through the suggestions here to see if the battery is ok anyway later on.

He said he'd run the anti-virus and spyware programmes (windows defender, adaware and avast) a few days before it happened as it was playing up but found nothing nasty. It was opening & closing programmes when he hadn't asked it to, changed web pages, but probably more weirdly, it was putting up different numbers and letters to the keys pressed and the functions were as erratic too.