darksymphony

Hi, Just wanted to add my voice to the chorus of dismay in this thread... I've had exactly the same problem. Can't believe it's been going on for so many years with no fix. I don't know if it was a surge of electricity, but for me it could well be that something got "fried". Last night I plugged in a new mp3 player and my laptop froze up. Usually when my laptop freezes it comes back to life again after a while, so I decided to just leave it be and went to bed. After a while, though, the speakers began making a weird crackling noise I'd never heard before, so I got up to look at it, and the laptop was really hot to touch - I mean really hot, I had to snatch my hand away when I touched the mousepad because it almost burned me. Never seen that happen before either. I immediately shut the machine off and left it overnight. I thought it was working fine the next morning... until I realised none of my USB devices were recognised. It's hard to tell if it was the mp3 player as many people here have reported or the overheating. I've read the whole thread and nothing has helped as yet (though I'm going to try leaving my laptop off overnight - I've tried removing all the power sources for a half hour, though, and that didn't work). It's a Packard Bell machine running on Vista, and I can get the other specs if they would be useful, though I doubt from reading this thread that they would be. All the same, if anyone happens to have any advice I'd be grateful.