After using this laptop perfectly fine the previous evening, I turned it on to suddenly discover the message upon startup "Error 1803: Unauthorized daughter card is plugged in - please removed the daughter card." I've never installed any new hardware in this machine, so this has me a bit perplexed. Nothing else on the comp. loads. I've tried disabling everything in BIOS from the boot lineup one piece at a time and that didn't do it. I've disabled the wireless radio and bluetooth and that didn't work either. Could this be a virus or just a hardware malfunction?

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/s... Says to remove the card. Saying that, it may mean that your bios has somehow changed or failed. Otherwise it might be that a card had been damaged or bumped and not reporting correctly. I guess it could be the motherboard. The place to start might be view bios and save any of the changes to start. If you find say a modem not there anymore or ethernet card then you may have to open it up and re-seat the card or further diag it. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10

Thanks for responding. Turned on the laptop the following evening without moving it or changing positions. Charged the sucker right up and suddenly it worked just as if the whole thing never happened. Ghost in the house? - my only logical explanation.