Topic: Intermittent Hard Drive communication with laptop

[andyhx]

Hi
Our Dell Inspiron 1525 has suddenly developed a problem. It boots up fine but after a period of time - from seconds to minutes - it suddenly stops interacting with the HDD. The mouse can be moved around but I cant initiate any hard drive activity from pressing buttons (Start etc) and have to resort to a hard power off. Ive reseated the HDD and done the std diagnostic memory test. The fan is working and in any case i can get the problem after first boot of the day, when its been off for 10 hours.
The laptop is a couple of years old.

Any thoughts appreciated.
Andy

[Rodders]

Hiya Andy,

Inspirons are a dead easy laptop to work on and modify (I've got three 1545's).  The main drawback is the quality of their HD's - if you're really unlucky it's a Hitachi, which is guaranteed until first use.  Whilst it's a fairly obvious question, have you tried another HD?  Also, if you're still running Vista, please consider changing to an OS that works properly, e.g. Windows 7.

If you find that your HD actually is to blame and you're feeling particularly brave, you might like to try a 128GiB Kingston SSD.  They're currently selling on the right side of 50 quid at ebuyer.com.  My laptop now goes like a very nippy thing indeed, what with the new SSD and upgrading the CPU to a T9300.