3172 Zombie laptop

Thursday, February 24, 2011

A drunk man’s words are a sober man’s thoughts.

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My laptop is acting weird.

I put it to sleep Tuesday night after closing the ISP (a Verizon broadband doohickey that plugs into a USB port) and the browser (Firefox), and Wednesday morning I found it up and running, and displaying the message "Windows has recovered from an unexpected shutdown".

Duh?

Scheduled things will still run through sleep, so I thought maybe it was running a defragment job and burped and thought it had to restart. That's reasonable, I guess.

So last night instead of sleep, I shut it down completely. Again this morning I found it up and running, and displaying the message "Windows has recovered from an unexpected shutdown".

Duh? That's not reasonable.

How do I kill it and make it stay dead? If I unplug it and it starts itself, it'll just run down the battery.

The internet is no help. Apparently it happens to other people, but they're on networks, or there's a bad connection in the "on" button and it gets jiggled, stuff like that, and I'm pretty sure that's not my problem.

I'm not worried about a virus, because I don't do unsafe stuff, and I have multiple sniffers and checkers. It's not somebody trying to remotely access my system because it's not connected to the internet at the time, and can't connect because of my connection type.

Sigh.

Another problem, all of a sudden it won't bring devices online on the fly. You know how if you plug something in, it makes that ba-cling sound, and then you can use it? Today I plugged the printer in a USB port, and never got the ba-cling. The printer remained offline. And I didn't get the ba-clunk sound when I unplugged it to try another USB port. Same thing with the scanner.

However, if the printer or scanner is plugged in when I do a restart, it's online and works fine.

Something is messed up.
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