Hi,

I made another topic in orcon about monitoring my network bandwidth across many different devices.
Tried smoothwall express 3.0 but it didnt seem to like installing from my USB DVD drive, and messed up one of my old IDE hard drives (which may have been dodgy anyway).

I fielded answers to what my other options might be, and thought pfSense sounded good. Went and downloaded the liveCD i386 install version from australian mirror. Checked the hash and download was fine. Burnt to DVD & verified it OK.

Went to install on the Mrs old IBM R40e P4 era machine. Had problems mounting ?? using the USB DVD drive, using default options. Googled around and noted that you should use the USB option.

Booted using the USB Option. Things seemed to be okay. Its asking e questions like to plug in WAN side connection, tests OK, plug in LAN side connection....not detected. I figure my (ancient circa pentium2 days) pcmcia ethernet card might not be compatible (because it's not detected) so I power off the machine (holding down the power button), to install a newer DickSmith branded model (dunno what chipset)....

and thats the last of her laptop

Ive unplugged the pcmcia addin card, the usb DVD, battery & power supply. Waited 15 minutes.
Reconnect the power supply. No Go.

The power light comes on, no picture, no bios, no post, no fans, no display backlight.

This missus hasn't used this laptop in about a year (she uses the iPad mostly now). But its quite a special machine because it has a chinese language windows xp license & install. I will have to hide the machine away and hope she doesn't notice if i cant get it going.

Im a linux newb, but have used an ubuntu install for my main machine back in 2007, and used various other live cds (like gparted, clonezilla, etc) so am a little familiar with its basics.

Any idea how to revive her laptop??