On Thu, 3 Jan 2013 21:28:50 -0800 (PST), klem kedidelhopper
wrote:

This is my wife's laptop which I posted recently. It had somehow
mysteriously "acquired" an unknown CMOS password which was preventing
me from getting through post and into boot. I believe that it was Jeff
who found a thread on another group which talked about this very thing
and offered a procedure for resolving it. I performed the procedure
and it cleared the password, (or whatever it was that was blocking the
boot sequence). I was very grateful for that help. After doing this
though the computer seemed flaky, freezing at times,etc, So we dumped
the hard drive and reloaded Windows. Now it seems to work fairly well
on battery, however most times, (but not always) oddly plugging the
power supply in will cause the computer to freeze. It is then
necessary to do a hard power down and boot back up with just battery.
This has always seemed to work. Most times though if the power cord is
connected it will either not boot, or it will boot, let you do a
couple of things like maybe get to a Website, and then perhaps a
couple of more keystrokes and then it will freeze. I have repeated
this problem many times now since clearing the phantom password and it
seems to be consistently tied into operating on AC power. Does anyone
have any ideas about this? Thanks, Lenny
My wife's Dell laptop was acting flaky when run on AC. LEDs flashing
randomly and refusal to boot up. Sometimes it would boot up and then
lock up. I traced it to the power supply. There are three wires in the
power supply cable. Of the three two are of a heavier gauge than the
third. One of the heavier wires, the braided one that also acts as a
shield was soldered badly. All I did was reflow the solder to this
wire and the laptop resumed normal operation.
Eric