Did linux kill it?

My brother has been using his old hp for about 5 years now. Last month I got him to switch to ubuntu Now after a month his laptop has died. I checked the ram and the common stuff now it doesn't even power on. I guess it was it's time, but that kind of got me to wondering did linux quickened the death of the hp or was it just coincidence?

 

Try taking the battery out? Try new RAM? It's probably one of those two, unless there is a short somewhere or it melted.

Linux definitely killed it tho. If you talk back to Linus he gets very angry, so I think that's probably what did it.

Ur probably making some sort of reference to the "Ubuntu kills laptops" thing from a year or so ago with bad power management settings with hdparm, if it was a hard drive problem it would still POST. Likely either a power issue or RAM if it won't turn on at all, but definitely something low level. Try removing the battery with the AC unplugged, try different RAM, or if you don't have spare sticks, try one at a time, etc. If it blinks power LED or gives you beep codes that means you know it's probably RAM. Good luck with the resurrection.

 

If it was an HP with the NVIDIA 7 or 8 series, it could have just been it's time to die. They fail quite often. I would suspect it has nothing to do with Ubuntu.

 

I've never even heard of a case where an OS led to a hardware failure. Chances are that XGX2007 is correct; the HP likely has an Nvidia 7th or 8th generation GPU that failed.

 

ditto....think of the fun virus writers would have....

 

I don't think Linux killed it. With the age of that computer, it was probably just it's time. Also, how often was the heat sink and stuff cleaned out? If it was never cleaned, then maybe the computer basically choked itself.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_poke

I was joking that Linux definitely killed it, but... my reference was not a joke:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/30/1742258

 

I stand corrected, then.