HP laptop fun June 6, 2010 at 10:44 am
A few weeks ago I inheirited a older HP/Compaq laptop. It suffered from extreme slowness and the current owner couldn’t get it to run any of his apps. I found this strange since it was a dual core machine running XP Pro.
Upon learning that it was originally sourced from Best Buy, it made it extremely likely that it was lacking RAM. The specs on the HP site called for 1 GB of RAM, but as usual for Best Buy, it only had 512 Mb in it.
A neighbor had an HP laptop which had a screen that was busted, so i pirated the ram, 2gb worth and placed it into the old machine. We had to take the machine apart since one of the ram chips was hidden under the keyboard. Nice design, HP!
Then I acquired a universal power supply since the original could not be located. Talk about a bad move, the screwy amperage delivered to the machine caused the CPU to cycle to 100%, rendering the machine useless. It had all sorts of trouble installing the new OS. Yep, I put windows 7 on it. Meh! Is about all I have to say that, just not enough there to be really impressed.
Anyway, google and trial and error lead me to working out the power supply issue. I sourced a new power supply through kijiji, with the help of a buddy at work. The new supply works like a charm and the machine is running great now.
That entire process took about 3 weeks to sort out. What fun!
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