This thread deserves a yay. I had a laptop from 2002 that all of a sudden stopped booting after the POST giving symptoms of bad memory (there were no errors, just failures to load anything), but swapping out everything, the battery/RAM/CPU/HDD etc, didn't change anything. Boot to anything: fail; linux live cds, linux install cds, windows from hard drive, windows install cds, floppy, only thing I could access was the BIOS. So after a couple months of working on it I threw the damn thing under my desk thinking it was something on the motherboard (ie screwed BIOS that I had no ability to flash) and I haven't touched it in oh, four or five years.
Today, I read this thread and decide to look at it again with the idea that I can have a go at ripping the LCD out of it and use it somewhere else as a 2nd monitor, but decide to check what the problem was first and see if the googles had new knowledge. I turn it on and it boots fine; every boot I get no operating system found (it had no hard drive, so not an error). It never used to make it that far. Ran CPU stress tests, memory, CD-ROM, etc tests all afternoon with the only problem when reading from the CD-ROM, and that was just random lags to like 0.15x read speeds. I acquired its HDD from another computer and am currently reinstalling windows XP... waiting to make this reply until it finishes... e finito.
tl;dr: My laptop fixed itself sometime between 2005 and today. I only found out because of this thread.
