Broken laptop

luckat

I've been trying to mend a Gateway laptop, about 500MHz, 256MB RAM, not sure of the hard drive size, running WinME.

The laptop doesn't look in great nick. The cover over the mouse is off on the left, so the mouse circuit board is open to God's air.

It starts up, shows the Gateway logo and then goes to the Windows ME logo and freezes. If you leave it on, it gives a message, eventually:

"Mprexe has caused an error in MPRSERV.DLL. Mprexe will now close. If you continue to experience problems, try restarting your computer."

If you okay this, it just goes to a blank screen with a mouse cursor (arrow).

I've tried holding down Esc when starting, or holding down Del when starting, but this just brings up a message saying "Press F2 to boot from floppy or CD; Press F1 to continue" - but neither of these keys get any response.

I've tried tapping F8, but get the same response, except that there's a message saying there was a keyboard error, and now tapping any of the keys gets an error beep.

I've tried taking out the battery and unplugging it for a while; no good.

I've tired taking out the extra memory and going through all these steps again. No good either.

The hard drive is making slight noises that I don't like on startup; this suggests that it may be dying - but then why won't it boot from a floppy or CD?

The floppy doesn't do anything at all (and I can't see which of the various lights is the floppy drive); the CD spins up but doesn't respond when I put a WinME or Win2K CD in it.

Any thoughts?

Champ

Well it sounds fairly battered...

"Press F2 to boot from floppy or CD; Press F1 to continue"

If you can't boot from floppy or cd; that needs to be addressed first before any software issues can be tackled.

I've tried taking out the battery and unplugging it for a while; no good.

I haven't used laptops much; so please forgive any ignorance but how would this solve any problems with your laptop?

By nature i think most laptops aren't ment to be opened by users; i think best thing to do right now is to get a list together of all of the problems and see a professional repair shop about it.

Maybe one of the more experienced laptop users here can help you more?:rolleyes:

luckat

Taking out the battery and unplugging the power sometimes resets the clock.

Capt'n Midnight

"Mprexe has caused an error in MPRSERV.DLL. Mprexe will now close. If you continue to experience problems, try restarting your computer."

Software most likely - Multi Protocol Router
With the complication of a dodgy keyboard.

F8 start in safe mode - remove all networking protocols and adaptors and restart.

Use an external keyboard to get the menus.

luckat

Cap'n, there's no place to plug in a PS/2 keyboard, and I haven't got a USB one.

Capt'n Midnight

I take it you have tried a Bootable CD or Floppy in it ?

If it boots off a floppy you could edit floppy's autoexec.bat to copy a:win.bat c:\
( win.bat contains the line win.com /D:N )

If the keyboard don't work (check gateway site for thier BIOS keys for that model) then is going to be a problem long term - so you should start scrounging/ borrowing)

Another option for the future - not yet, only when you've given up - would be to take the drive out - put it in another computer/laptop (one advantage 98 has over NT/2K/XP) and sort out sw there and put back in again, possibly installing VNC so you can control the original laptop remotly when you put the drive back.