Lenovo W500 Laptop – display issues
I’ve previously mentioned briefly about the overheating of my lenovo laptop, and how it frequently just shuts down and will not allow a restart for an hour or so while it cools down. I’ve also mentioned that the last time it shut down, I have had NO video since. The machine sounds like it boots (or goes someway towards doing so), but no display. Nothing.
I’ve FINALLY found the time to book it in for repairs. While on the phone, the lovely gentleman on the other end of the line told me to remove the power cable and battery, then hold down the power button for 20 seconds. Apparently this resets some bits and pieces on the board. After which, upon plugging the power back in I was able to semi-reboot my machine (it froze at the ubuntu splash screen, but I’ll work on that another time).
It is still going in to see if they can stop it from overheating – probably just needs to be opened and vacuumed, but warranty stipulates I cannot do this myself.
So… I didn’t know about the 20 second deal. I thought maybe this could come in handy for someone else with a lenovo that won’t boot. I don’t know which models this works for.
New computer!!!
I finally bit the bullet and purchased some new hardware. My work laptop keeps freezing up continuously, and it was likely never going to be thrilled about running everything that I would be needing to run on it. So, I now have a sexy new desktop capable of doing all that I want (and then some), running smoothly across my 2*24″ wide screens at 1920*1200 resolution. This is fun!!!
Specs:
- Intel Core i5-2500 3.3Ghz 1155pin
- Patriot Gamer2 DDR3 (16 GB thereof FTW!!)
- ASUS P8Z68-V Z68 DDR3 Intel 1155pin motherboard
- Gigabyte 1Gb 6870 PCI-E VGA card
- WD Green 2TB HDD
- Blu-ray writer
Running Ubuntu 11.10 quite happily, although am yet to determine my preference for window manager… So far they all irk me in one way or another. (It may also have a windows partition for iTunes and gaming... Just quietly...)
This should quite joyfully run all my VMs for Samba dev work 
Overall, happy
libstdc++5.so installation
Newer versions of Ubuntu (and debian?) are now using libstdc++6 instead of libstdc++5, and the repositories no longer contain the older version. There are still a number of applications available that depend on libstdc++5, with a typical error message that you might see looking a little like this:
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of <insert name of attempted install here>:
<insert name of attempted install here> depends on libstdc++5 (>= 1:3.3.4-1); however:
Package libstdc++5 is not installed.
A google search takes you to any number of how to fix it guides, with many people offering a version of libstdc++5.so on their site. Personally, I’d prefer to get it directly from one of the distros…
If you need to install libstdc++5, downloads and repos are available direct from debian here: http://packages.debian.org/lenny/i386/libstdc++5/download
