I Have a laptop. A very old one. I've bought it in 2006, with my first-ever earned money, after 3 months of part time job. It's an Acer TravelMate 2424. It wasn't very powerful back then, with it's 1.6GHz Celeron M, 512mb ram, Intel graphics card and 40Gb HDD, and certainly isn't powerful now, but I just like it.
And we go way back. I wrote my first pieces of code on it. And it really saved my ass, when my PC broke up.
I managed to break and replace it's screen (for some time I used it without one, like an old commodore, attached to TV). I managed to break and replace HDD, and CD. But I never thought of replacing it, until it was really old. But it worked, and I don't really feel like replacing a PC or a laptop that works, even if it's just a little slow. I used it mainly for reading and writing, so I didn't need it to be fast, or powerful.
But one day it began to turn itself off. Just like this, without any warning it would turn off. And after it shut down, I couldn't turn it on for some time. And one day it just stopped turning on.
I checked power source, I checked battery, checked everything and assumed that mobo was dead. Bought a new mobo on eBay, replaced it, but it still wouldn't works.
I gave up thinking it was really dead, and bought a new one. Which I turned out to hate, but it's another story.
So I threw it in the closed and leaved it there.
A couple of moths ago my neighbor came to me with PC that wouldn't torn on. I've instantly thought about my old Acer, which had the same problem. I've checked everything, like I did with my laptop, and everything was fine. And then I thought about checking the CPU. It turned out that CPU was burned up, and pretty bad, with black spots all over, and thermal paste that got rock-hard.
This is when I got illuminated. The problem of my old laptop wasnt in mobo, but in CPU.
Fortunately the mobo i bought on eBay came with CPU. So I took my old laptop apart, replaced CPU, and it began to work! The graphics card was broken though, but now it was turning on. I reverted back to the original mobo, and it was working just fine.
Until I decided to install gentoo on it.
Installing gentoo means compiling every part of OS. And I just couldn't get things like kernel, or other things to compile. Got errors all over the place.
But the pre-compiled distros, like ubuntu, were working fine.
My guess was failing ram. I've run memtest and in fact the ram was failing. But something told me to test the ram in my fathers laptop. And there they turned OK.
I've guessed that ram controller on my mobo was failing, since the errors was on 513mb, while I have only 512mb of ram.
So I've gave up, and the laptop again landed in my closet.
Yesterday, purely out of boredom I decided to take it apart and test the ram again.
So I started testing the first ram bank, and it turned OK.
Same with second.
Same with both of them.
I've tested them in every possible combination, and result of test was always positive.
I don't know or understand why.
I'm going to assemble it and try to install gentoo again. I'll see what I'll get this time.