I study overseas and I brought my laptop (Dell Inspiron 5150 Windows XP) over here from the US and it has been working fine for over a year.
Just today, my computer began to work in a very strange way. I came back from school, and noticed that I left my computer on and it had gotten really hot with the sun on it. In response I turned on the fans on the stand on which my computer rests, designed especially for cooling down a PC. A few seconds later the whole computer shuts down instantly. This can happen when the computer overheats so I gave it a half an hour to let the internal temp fall. I figured that the fan pushed air into a sensor and that caused the comp to shut down. When I tried later, I got nothing. I tried removing and reinserting items (hard drive and battery) and eventually got my PC to start without the battery inside. I thought it was the battery, but later with more experimentation I don’t know what it was, but I do know that my battery is not the issue.
Now I have a completely different problem, which from a hardware perspective confuses me, as to why my computer acts as if it is dead one sec, and then fine the next. Currently, everything works fine except one thing (while an hour ago it felt like the whole computer melted down). This is with the USB ports. They send out electricity to any device that needs it, like the fans on my cooling stand or the light on a USB stick. The thing is that it won’t actually use the device. If I plug in certain items, like a keyboard, my entire computer freezes up. When I was moving out parts I did notice a smell as if something was burnt. I can’t be sure what that something was however. I tried to investigate but it was impossible to take apart the laptop safely as the screen cable is very short, short enough that you can’t take the bottom panel cover off. The external appearance of the USB ports looks normal.
I am going to try to reinstall my chipset drivers and perhaps that will allow them to work. I don’t think that will do anything as they often work without installing any drivers (for instance when I had to reinstall Windows a few times). I am thinking that maybe my tinkering disconnected the port and now Windows is having problems reinstalling it (without telling me). I did notice that it had to reinstall my DVD-ROM.
My best guess is that something got shocked. I say this because earlier that day I had a new arrangement for all my USB devices (I have 6 of them plugged into the computer one way or another.) One of these is a printer, and it said that one should turn the printer off before plugging in the USB, or it can damage the printer. I did it anyways and it was fine. But I am thinking that maybe the extra electricity from turning on my fans could have done it? Or caused an overload? I had all 6 ports in before, just not in such a configuration.
In any case, most of this seems to be linked to the fans and the printer, as I never used the printer before in my new configuration and it was the fans that apparently caused my comp to shut down only seconds later.
Is there any way to be sure? Also, if something did get electrocuted, what could that possibly be in a laptop by the USB ports and is there any way to fix it? I would hate to have to type and use the mouse on my keyboard for the time until my next computer.
