As part of a mini blitz I've been doing, I came across the laptop that was condemned a couple of years ago. Nothing to loose giving it a another go. Completely stripped it down and cleaned all the dust and fluff out of it. Spent a while poking around the suspect area (power input circuitry). Put it back together, and to my great shock, it worked!

Rest of the day was spent recovering the virus-free files from it's hard disk (again), before installing a clean copy of the operating system. I lost count of the number of (Windows XP) updates that were downloaded to bring things up-to-date. Well over a hundred...