An Interesting Lenovo Problem

For the past few years I have used a Lenovo IdeaPad S12 Netbook as my primary travel computer. It’s been with me on many a trip and has hummed along in a half dozen countries. But then the inevitable happened, it started getting quirky. A slow boot here, a shut down there, all of the signs of a computer on it’s last legs. I wasn’t surprised, after all it’s close to four years old and still runs on WinXp!!

Finally last week it wouldn’t boot at all. When it was turned on the power light and battery charging lights would come on and the hard drive light would flicker on very briefly. And that was all it would do. My thoughts were that something had finally died and it wouldn’t be worth repair costs. After all, a new 12.1” screen laptop with a 1.6GHz processor and 160GB hard drive costs less than repairs would.

Then I remembered something odd. A couple of years ago we did an article on upgrading the RAM on several Netbooks and ran into some strange anomalies. Some computers had video problems or other symptoms that could be traced back to memory handling. Could the extra RAM possibly be the problem?

A quick trip to our lab's repair table, removal of one screw and a panel and the extra RAM was out. We put the battery back on and tried to boot up. Presto! It works like a champ! As a matter of fact, I’m writing this post on the S12 right now and it works as well as it ever did.

It turned out that what we thought was a dead Netbook just needed to have something that we added on removed. It’s nice to have a trusted friend back again!