I recently bought a Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Pro V2040 for £10 and was well aware it had some issues, Firstly, the hinges were HORRIFIC, awfully slack, I tightened those and while they are still a bit bouncy they are far better and don't need replacing. Secondly the windows on it was knackered with blue screens, initially I thought the hard drive or ram might have been knackered but it was the generic blue screen where too much crap is installed and drivers weren't cohabiting well. A quick reinstall of Ubuntu solved this however it had a few issues as highlighted below. It seems the disc drive and usb ports refuse to initialize until you boot upto windows and restart THEN I could reformat by USB but the disk drive still didn't want to be detected either in BIOS or Windows, I've restored the BIOS to its defaults but same thing. There's another issue where if you press one side of the laptop too hard it will just restart, There are two small but almost an inch in length cracks running along the bezel just below the keyboard, I figure I could epoxy in something to stabilize it that would stop this but I'm always willing to listen to other ideas. I really don't want to drop any money on this as it'd defeat the point of me buying it (A cheap laptop without needing to spend much). Any ideas? Only really need ideas on the bottom two paragraphs.
Not sure about the first problem, perhaps open it up and take a gander at the circuit boards, see if there's anything amiss? I had a simialr problem with the Cd drive on my laptop, in the end it turned out that the drive just needed replacing but that wouldn't explain your USB problems of course. As for the resetting, it might be worth taking a look to see if there's something shorting out somewhere underneath when you press down, some insulating tape should hopefully fix that problem. Or maybe the power socket is loose and pressing down disconnects it
Is that when running on batteries, or the PSU? I had a similar problem with mine, turned out the power socket had gotten loose, a quick resoldering fixed that. See if you can find disassembly instructions for your model first though, laptops can be a pain to take apart if you want to do anything else beyond upgrading the HD and RAM.
The battery still holds two hours. The power jack is on the left side and its when you press down too hard on the right side that it switches off.
Board is probably shorting against something, my bet is metal casing. Crack it open and take a look, if you're lucky it'll be a bit black. As for installing an OS laptop BIOSes of that era had plenty of trouble using USB ports until initialized by the OS. If the floppy drive works just fine (if it has one) I'd suggest doing a netboot install of Ubuntu. Kind of a pain to setup but it'll work quite well. Used to play with older laptops for kicks and you'd likely be surprised at the crazier ways to install an OS I had to come up with. My favorite was copying the contents of a Win95 CD to the root of the hdd using a secondary machine and using a DOS boot floppy to start the install. Usually worked, but not always.
:lol: I've done something like that before, but it was a WinME CD that was fickle about booting and had to use a Win98 disc for basic DOS/CD-ROM support to get the installer going (there wasn't a floppy drive).
I did that with windows 98 once, it wouldn't boot from the Cd and the DOS floppy refused to boot the CD rom drivers Is it just me or did rso essentially repeat my suggestion about the loose power thingy
I've worked with laptops from around that point and typically disassembly isn't too hard. If I get it open and it is shorting what do I do? The electrical tape like was suggested?
A layer or two. If it is something really sharp and pointy (like the lead coming out of a solder joint) you might want to put something a bit less penetrable/thicker. Also a good chance that since the casing is loose something may have been damaged at some point. Reseating and/or fixing the problematic parts might fix the shorting completely.
Electrical tape, or hot glue is ok. Either way, both methods ruin the board when you need them removed in the future, if you should ever need to solder in that place. Tape leaves residue, and hot glue does not come off easily.
Tape residue is easily removed. It hardly ruins the board. Also, I would put tape on the metal shielding, not the board anyway.
Thanks for the input. Next time I get some freetime I'll do this. Still need help with the USB port/cd drive issue.
You said you got USB to work, can you still boot from it? If so, you can just install the os from that and ignore the DVD drive. Which os are you wanting to install and can you still boot from USB?
Let me explain the reformatting process with this computer. I almost always reformat from USB anyway, I turn the computer on, if I plug in the usb drive now it wont even detect it and will boot upto whatever OS is on it (at that point before reformatting it was windows I'd then restart and plug in my USB. I'd already set it to boot from USB but only after that restart has happened will the USB stick be detected.
There is no reason why that should happen. If you can boot from USB in the bios, it shouldnt matter to boot into Windows first. Try booting the machine with USB in, if it doesnt detect/show in the boot order first time, just do CTRL + ALT + DEL and try again. I occasionally have that happen with a few machines, but not often. There is nothing that windows will do to cause it to work, sounds like its just a case of a warm reboot helps it. Also the usual - try different port, etc
