The cooling for most laptops comes from underneath your computer. Because laptops run hotter these days that cooling is essential. If you do a lot of computing on a soft surface you likely blocked the airflow to the case and the heat fried your hard drive (look for a grill or open slots on the bottom of your laptop). Likely there are only a small percentage of sectors bad, but once it fries it only gets worse. This is a long way of saying you likely need a new hard drive but most of your data should be recoverable. Leave your laptop off until I consult with Tom about it, but that is my best guess at the moment... if I am correct it will be the fourth one in the last six months I've seen, so I'm fairly certain about this.
(To ease your roommate's mind most Apple models pull their air from around the screen hinge and thus are resistant to this problem but it is always better to have a hard surface under your laptop when you use it to allow airflow.)
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Date: 2007-01-19 03:28 am (UTC)(To ease your roommate's mind most Apple models pull their air from around the screen hinge and thus are resistant to this problem but it is always better to have a hard surface under your laptop when you use it to allow airflow.)