A bit over a month ago, my trusty old 12″ laptop went dead. Just out of the blue. I think I’d booted up the Ubuntu live CD, then I shut down, and then the laptop did nothing. If I plugged the power cord in, I’d get a charging light, but pressing the power button resulted in absolutely zilch.

Scouting around Google, this appeared to be a semi-common problem with my specific model, and the best guess was that it was somehow related to some ACPI bug in the BIOS that resulted in some weird state in the CMOS (enough acronyms for you?). Some people reported success after holding the power button down. No luck here.

The only other options were:

1. Cutting the CMOS battery off the motherboard
2. Leaving the main battery out until the CMOS battery died

Not wanting to harm my laptop, I opted for the latter. And so my laptop sat. Every few days, I’d pop the battery in and give the power button a go, but it was the always the same disappointing void. I began to seriously doubt that the laptop would ever recover.

Until tonight. I popped the battery in like normal and hit the button. And there was a little blue light.

How you say… w00t.

So here’s some hope for you Averatec 2370 owners with inexplicably dead machines on your hands: give them a rest without their batteries. It just might change your world.