I think my portable is dying a slow, painful death. It now randomly will not boot properly. Upon rebooting, it hangs just after the RAM check for about a minute. An error message appears stating that there is a hardware failure (PXE-E61 to be exact) and to check the hard drive cable. Considering that the hard drive is located underneath the keyboard and the wrist rest of this portable, it is not a simple matter to check the cable. (And try Googling on Akoya LS Medion with that error message and you get precisely one hit — with some useless suggestions.)
There are a few things that might cause the error, assuming the error message is correct and it’s a hard drive-related issue. The hard drive might be dying. So far, the error checks I’ve done have not returned any errors (doesn’t necessarily mean anything). The disk is regularly defragged and cleaned. Maybe a new hard drive would resolve the problem. Not sure.
The problem might also be caused by the hard drive controller failing on the motherboard. This would be bad. Because the controller is integrated into the motherboard, correcting the problem would probably involve replacing the motherboard — the most expensive part of the portable. At this rate, because the machine is 1.5 years old, I would be better off replacing the portable instead of sinking money into a new motherboard.
The longer I’ve let this problem go, the worse it has gotten. It now regularly takes about 8 reboots before the machine loads Windows (instead of the afore-mentioned error message).
If checking the cables doesn’t resolve the issue, I’ll take the portable back to where I got it and ask their tech support to give me an estimate. If they can’t, then it’s time to get a new portable… but only after I’ve earned enough to get a new one without putting it on credit.
So what would I get? A Mac. I’m NOT using Windows Vista on any of my computers. No way in hell.
