I need some help with a PC. :)

[AutumnDae]

Long time not talk, heh? Well anyways, I figure SOMEONE here has got to be good with PCs. I'm a Mac person myself, but my sister has an HP laptop that stopped working today randomly....Or not so randomly?

I can't really tell you too much about the laptop itself, other than it's an HP, and it runs Windows 7. It's been acting kind of weird lately, probably from viruses? The battery is shot, and has been for a while. It has to remain plugged into the charger at all times. If the charger comes unplugged, the computer shuts off with no warning. It also asks if you want to start in Safe Mode or start Windows Normally every time you turn the computer on. As well as some other black screen at start up that you have to click enter or return or whatever to select for the computer to start up.

Today, my sister turned the laptop on, or attempted to anyways. All that appears in a black screen, with a small white line in the upper left hand corner, like a cursor, on space indicator or whatever it is that they're called. And that's it, and I have absolutely no idea what to do to it now.

Can anyone offer any sort of advice? Is it shot? Worth fixing? Or rather, how much would it run to repair a laptop of this kind?

[Infidelitas]

Do you have an external/portable hard drive plugged in while you try and boot the computer up? If you do, the computer sometimes wants to boot up of the external hard drive.

If this is the case, unplug the hard drive and re-boot the computer, then plug it back in when the computer boots up.

[TheMatrix]

Mhmm, sounds like you might need a new laptop.
If you really want to fix it, you could try to get another OS(albeit Linux, another Windows, or whatever) and try booting from that. Otherwise, I'm afraid it's kaput :(

[Commander Thor]

Mhmm, sounds like you might need a new laptop.
If you really want to fix it, you could try to get another OS(albeit Linux, another Windows, or whatever) and try booting from that. Otherwise, I'm afraid it's kaput :(
Or she could, uh, you know, fix it.


@Autumn, it does sound as if the laptop is beyond the point of no return. Meaning, it's quite simply easier to re-install Windows, than it is to try & troubleshoot (Especially over the internet in a forum) and fix the issue. As for re-installing, if you know the exact model of the laptop, that would be great, so I could tell you which button to press to get into your recovery partition (assuming you have one). Most newer OEM-built computers/laptops come with a recovery partition, which allows you to blow away the already-installed OS, and re-install Windows to the way it was when the computer left the factory.
If you happen to not have a recovery partition, do you know if it came with any installation media? Such as a disc that quite clearly says "Operating System" or something along those lines?

Also, try mashing the F8 key right after you press the power button to turn it on, keep pressing it until you get the advanced boot options menu, select "Last Known Good Configuration", and hit enter. See if Windows will boot up then, if not, repeat the F8 key during boot, and select "Safe Mode", then launch System Restore from the start menu, and restore the computer from a restore point from before you started seeing the issues.
If a system restore works, you won't need the recovery partition.


Also, the battery is simply a bad battery I'm afraid, the only way to 'fix' it, is to buy a new battery.
If the laptop has Windows 7 on it though, it really shouldn't be that shot, unless it wasn't going through a proper charge/discharge cycle (Windows 7 hasn't been out THAT long for batteries to start being completly gone if they're cared for properly).
Batteries need to be completely (Well, almost completely, you don't need to let it die, but let it get down to 5-10%) drained, and then fully charged again at the very least once a week. The main issue I see with batteries going bad in laptops, is people leave their laptop plugged in for weeks at a time, without ever discharging the battery, which is very bad for it. Or on the flipside, people let their laptops sit completly dead for weeks, without ever charging it, wich is also very bad for them.

[AutumnDae]

Thanks, I'll try that stuff tonight and see how it goes. :)

As far as the battery goes, I believe it's also a case of a bad charger. The one that came with the laptop got lost? Or broken? I can't remember which, and my sister purchased another one, not through HP, some random website or something. Although she didn't charge properly before. Anyone that used the laptop would plug it in and unplug it at completely random intervals. She isn't too worried about the battery though, it's not that much of a hassle to leave it plugged in while using it.

[anonymous53]

Alright, well Commandor Thor has already covered you're going to need to reinstall the OS.

As far as the charger, did you check the wattages and everything? Quite possibly a bad charger could have destroyed the batteries ability to hold a charge, so I would say purchase a new battery ~60 dollars direct from HP
and a new charger ~40 dollars direct from HP