I have decided against upping the voltage as the PSU is chucking out 22,5v the absolute maxx for the laptop accordimg to thr manual is 22.18v. The laptop can turn the display off with a fumction key so will try that next time it plays up.

I really want to put an SSD in but the Sata IDE adaptors dont seem to support 33 IDE speed just 66, 100 and 150 and its the same for IDE SSDs. When I bought an IDE SSD the bios thought I had two hard drives in instead of one hard drive and a cdrom.

In reply to a post by Banger:

Sata IDE adaptors dont seem to support 33 IDE speed...

Are you sure about that?

In reference to www.scan.co.uk/products/lycom-st-173-7-covert-msata-ssd-as-high-spe...:

ATA/ATAPI UDMA data transfer rate of 150, 133, 100, 66, 44, 33, 25, 16.7 MB/s

Interesting another option for the laptop.

Don't you think that you're flogging an [almost] dead horse?

Once it bites the dust I will replace but its fast enough for browsing with K Meleon (Firefox clone) and has an unused new Hitachi 40gb drive, good enough for XP.

I hate to throw anything that still has life in it. Its a little project of mine.

Put an offer of a tenner in for a replacement CD drive for the laptop and it was accepted and on its way while the old CD drive is now working fine, typical!

Totally dead now not even turning the disc, tried turning off display and removing battery just in case they were taking too much juice but nada. Not looking forward to changing the drive as its underneath the motherboard and there is a lot of screws.

Take the hard disk out and try to boot from the CD drive.

Took the hard drive out but no go, its trying to spin up twice with or without the hard disk but no go, I wonder if its a motor problem.

It probably is. Can you check the supply voltages? It might save you a lot of trouble if they're out.