Hi.
I have an Acer Travelmate laptop, now just over three and a half years old. It was working fine until recently when I installed a BlueTooth adaptor from Argos which uses Blue Soleil.
The USB adaptor was so small that I thought I would leave it in permanently- I have four USB connections- but almost as soon as I had installed it, the laptop was refusing to come out of hibernation. Sometimes it wouldn't even start until I removed the power and battery.
Like a numpty, I completely forgot the rules about figuring out what has changed since it last worked properly and put up with this for several days before realising that the USB dongle was probably the problem. It was, and removing it sorted it out- for a day or two.
Now, nearly every time I put the laptop to sleep or into hibernation, I get the "Windows did not shut down properly" message. Of course, knowing a thing or two about computers, I updated my video driver but it still doesn't work. Yesterday I uninstalled the BlueTooth software and today I looked to restore the system, but it was too long ago.
The laptop is getting on a bit and I did wonder if it was a hardware problem as I do have to press the cover down of the laptop to make contact with the shutdown switch, but I can leave it on a table top, put it to sleep using the start menu but when I press the power button it simply doesn't start properly.
The battery has been rubbish for a while now, lasting long enough in hibernation to bring it home from work without powering down, but now it is stuck at 3% and not charging. I don't want to buy a new battery in case the laptop is knackered and I don't want to buy a new laptop because I have OEM Office installed and won't be able to use it again.
Any ideas how to fix a software problem? There is nothing recorded in the error log for most instances of failure, but today, I got two Critical failures- the last sleep transition was unsuccessful. If it is hardware, what's most likely to be wrong?
