HP laptop with a few issues

mitchb

Hi

My dad has had an HP laptop for around 2.5 years, it has vista home as its OS.

Recently it has started to take around 15 - 20 attempts to turn on. It powers up howevre this is about as far as it gets, hard drive light starts but it never connects to a wireless network. Wifi light stays orange instead of going blue - normally it instantly goes to blue.

Also on looking at it the HD shows as being full accept for around 45mb. It is a 120gb hard drive and their is no way he has that amount of stuff on it. Maybe about 1gb of photos and 15gb of films.

He had asked me to reformqt it as it is running slow and may resolve the above issues however cant find a restore disc, their is a partition on the hard drive but its only got one file and windows doesnt know which program to open it with.

Would i be able to use my home premium disc that came with my dell laptop to reinstall vista on his machine?

He has the product licence key number on his laptop and reading around indicates the key determines which type of vista will be loaded not the acyual disc.

dg1dd1ngs_2

Stick Zorin on there and see if he notices...

full-stop

mitchb said:
Recently it has started to take around 15 - 20 attempts to turn on. It powers up however this is about as far as it gets, hard drive light starts but it never connects to a wireless network. Wifi light stays orange instead of going blue - normally it instantly goes to blue.

So for clarity, you power on, the laptop starts but monitor remains blank. Does that sum up.....

mitchb said:
Also on looking at it the HD shows as being full accept for around 45mb. It is a 120gb hard drive and their is no way he has that amount of stuff on it. Maybe about 1gb of photos and 15gb of films.

Hunch. HDD possibly failing or MBR issues? Reason I say this is because 1. boot failure and 2. you mention HD free space of 45mb (granted, this may be due to other reasons (virus/malware).

Have you tried to run the HD manufacturer's software to test. What I would also do in order to confirm the hardware integrity of the laptop is to boot from a Linux Live CD.

mitchb said:
He had asked me to reformqt it as it is running slow and may resolve the above issues however cant find a restore disc, their is a partition on the hard drive but its only got one file and windows doesnt know which program to open it with.

Restore partitions place by laptop manufacturer's (usually at the begining of the HD) will be a few GBs in size. If the size of this hidden partition is small then this will likely not be a restore partition.

Good Luck

closed

look at the manual on how to get to the factory restore partition, backup data first.