Since Friday my old Dell Inspiron 8100 has refused to start. The lights go on, it whirs for a second, and then the lights go out. It feels like a mainboard failure, but I don't do hardware. These laptops seem to be worth about 500 EUR new on ebay, so I guess that a new laptop might be the most economical solution, but it seems like such a waste.

As I'm working away from home, this is likely to stop all my open source work for a while. If anyone knows of a laptop repair place in Karlsruhe, an email would be nice.