I purchased a C3500 yesterday as a present for my mother-in-law. She is semi-handicapped and I thought the stylus would help her. She current has a word processor that is almost impossible to read the display and uses a web-tv to browse the internet and for e-mail. This is was going to be her first pc.

I am not familiar with tablet pc's and was impressed with the additional capabilites it offers. The problem is that it just suddenly died after about 4 hours of use. The charger is getting juice and is worm, but nothing appears to be getting to the laptop. I read in one of the messages here that the AMD can "burn out" under certain configurations. Could this be what happened? The unit did not feel excessively hot after it died. It almost appears that the charger is not making contact for some reason.

The plug does not go in as easily as I would expect it to.

Is there something that may have caused this that I am not aware of? I recently had another laptop (Pentium 4) that turned off because one of the fans got jamed with cat hair. After cleaning it out, all is well. It is hard to believe that this CPU died under such little stress. It seems to me that AMD would have expired by now if their cpu's were so fragile - no slam against AMD meant here.

Any help/advice will be appreciated. I am not familiar with Averatec. Are these machines less realiable than most?

Thanks in advance

Sorry to read there is a problem after 4 hours.

The light on the charger is going but do you see any lights on the Averatec?

Unplug the unit and reseat the battery. Try to power up the unit with just the battery and then let us know.

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The plug doesn't go in easily? If anything, most people here believe it to be too loose. Tablet PCs should not use standard barrel DC plugs, but instead some kind of locking mechanism and perhaps a thinner cord that doesn't impede tablet use in any orientation.

You might want to take a really good look at the plug itself, and the socket. Is there any chance that something could have gotten jammed into the plug or the laptop socket? Do you ever remember having an orange light on the laptop indicating that the battery was charging?

If something really is broken, the odds are that it is the power converter inside the laptop. I had one of those die a few years ago (in a different laptop, obviously). I was curious so I opened the laptop and troubleshooted the power board until I found a tiny blown SMD fuse. I could have replaced or jumpered the fuse, but decided to let warranty replace it with a whole new power converter board. In my case the laptop would still run when plugged in, but would not charge the battery. The good news is that if you have to send it in for service, it should be a very quick operation to replace the power board. They won't waste a lot of time trying to troubleshoot it like they would with a more expensive motherboard.

Of course it still could be the power brick. Do you have, or know anyone who has, a multimeter? There should be 19 volts coming out of the brick, I believe.

There were no lights on the laptop. I believe something let go inside the machine. There was a slight popping sound when it died. The light on the charger itself remained on and the charger itself was warm when the laptop died, but gradually cooled.

Anyway, I returned it for another one. I have not seen any other power problems posted, so I thought it was worth another look.

Thanks for the reply