that the EC failed. This computer did always have its quirks with devices, like that one time the SD card caused Windows to spit out like 100 device errors per second and slowed it down to a crawl.
All this to say I just bought an EC and 5 BIOS chips to see if I can bring it back to life, for the lulz.
If I do bring it back I'm seriously thinking of kitting it out to the max. I'm talking NVMe SSD, FHD IPS Touchscreen, maxxed out RAM and a WI-FI 6E card and using it as a tinkering machine. Installing weird things and trying out new stuff, you know, to feed my brainrot.