Reinstalling a very old laptop (Aspire 1360) with its Windows XP Home and it halts just like a power shutdown. Trouble was that when trying an Ubuntu install then that worked. Odd.

Redid the WinXP install and it failed – retried the Ubuntu install and finally got an error message that shot off the screen but it was useful – overtemperature (80 Deg C) shutting down. The ACER BIOS (v1.09) doesn’t actually show the hardware sensors – gee that’s useful.

Interestingly I had also tried to start a Window Vista install and I got a “STOP: c000021a (Fatal System Error)” Error

I’d already cleaned out a whole ecosystem of colonies of “dust bunnies” from this machine but looks like something else has a problem. So took off the plastic cover with the feature buttons on on the top of the laptop to see if there was anything else and then tried the heatsink screws – one seemed looser than the others.

So far vacuum, tighten heatsink screws, remove dust and cat hair and swapped around memory chip positions seems to have done the trick on the install. I now have it back as a Windows XP with dual-boot to Ubuntu 11.04.