Old XP laptop not displaying web pages....! And how long for battery to last?

DEBTMONKEY1A

Hi, again sorry if i sound a bit dim (!). Bought an old Compaq Pressario XP laptop for £40 on the local market...just as a vehicle to watch movies if I'm abroad, no gaming, heavy use...only surfing/e-mails. Connected fine to wireless at 54mps. However......when I type in a web adress I just get the 'page can't be displayed due to technical issues'. Called Sky who were very good...spent an hour trying various things but to no avail. Even tried it connected to LAN/HDMI cable bur same issue.

When running 'diagnose connection problems' from the 'tools' menu I get this message - 'windows cannot connect to the internet using HTTP, HTTPS or FTP. This is a problem probably caused by firewall settings on your computer.

Check the firewall settings for the HTTP port 80, HTTPS port 443 & FTP port 21.'

I've tried displaying a web page with firewall OFF but still doesn't work!

Any ideas???! Sky guy thinks it's a knackered 'network adaptor'...whatever that is. He suggested a cheap USB wireless dongle....worth a go??? Any suggestions or help in 'baby language' (I'm not very teccy!) would be appreciated.

How long sohould a battery last??? The one in the PC dies urber fast...100% last night at switch off....3% on booting up this am (kind of expected a knackered battery at that price)-new batteries are a tennerish on ebay/amazon-any ideas how long they should last & can you buy 'higher powered' batteries (sorry if that sounds thick lol!).

Thanks again for any advice.

Neil_Jones

Install another web browser like this:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox

The browser built into XP is so old and out of date a lot of pages won't work with it.

With regards to the battery, the average life span of modern ones is a couple of hours. If a battery is loosing 97% of its charge in eight hours it's clearly depleted.

Laptop batteries are made up of a series of connected rechargeable "cells" that provide the power to the laptop as they discharge. The cells can only be charged and recharged so many times before there comes a point where they can't hold their charge any more.

All batteries naturally decay and lose their charge over time so even a fully charged battery if left enough will eventually discharge itself.

Not all laptops have high capacity batteries available for them. If they do and the cost isn't much greater, be aware that the high capacity batteries are a bit more chunky and will stick out the bottom of the laptop more, making it unlikely to sit flat on the desk any more.

DEBTMONKEY1A

Thanks Neil! As I can't access the web on the laptop assume I can download onto a flash/usb stick & load it to laptop like that?

DEBTMONKEY1A

Neil-YOU ARE A STAR! Downloaded latest .exe set up for Firefox to flash drive-web works a treat! Faster than my base unit! Thanks! Now need to fix Outlook (or change ti thunderbird etc)...see my other thread. THANKS AGAIN!

NiftyDigits

£40? What were you thinking?

You can get much better for that price. Why didn't you ask before purchase?

I'll pop the recovery disc in your inbox, but the machine is really a dog with a single core Celeron.

DEBTMONKEY1A

Hi! Seemed to be the going rate on gumtree/e-bay etc.....think it's dual core but could be wrong? At least the web is now working lol (!). Ta for the recovery disk!

NiftyDigits

Intel Celeron M Processor 420 1.60 GHz
Intel Celeron-M Processor 430 1.73 GHz

Single core. Very poor.

Next time, ask beforehand.

DEBTMONKEY1A

Not the best (!) but I spose for e-mail/web browsing, the odd bit of tv or dvd playing it'll do the job. Was a bit of an 'impulse' buy but at least the web is working now! Thanks for the PM. Will update the thread once sorted.

NiftyDigits

DEBTMONKEY1A wrote: »

Not the best (!) but I spose for e-mail/web browsing, the odd bit of tv or dvd playing it'll do the job. Was a bit of an 'impulse' buy but at least the web is working now! Thanks for the PM. Will update the thread once sorted.

I imagine painfully slow in practice. Modern web pages are often media rich. You could perhaps spend £7 on 2GB of RAM, but I wouldn't want to spend any more on that machine.

Making an offer on something like this; http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Dell-Vostro-1500-15-4-Intel-Core2-T9300-3gb-Ram-320Gb-HD-Wins-10-Pro-Camera-/222226871111 would have made more sense than the Compaq.
Anyway, done now. Can only try to make the best of what you have.

DEBTMONKEY1A

Nifty...will try my luck when market next on (Saturday) for a refund...given that battery lasts about 10 mins & what was sold did not connect to web. Worth a go....& if I succeed will deffo look at your ebay suggestions-tahnks for your help! If all else fails will reinstall iso, compaq xp operating system. Thanksd again!

NiftyDigits

DEBTMONKEY1A wrote: »

Nifty...will try my luck when market next on (Saturday) for a refund...given that battery lasts about 10 mins & what was sold did not connect to web. Worth a go....& if I succeed will deffo look at your ebay suggestions-tahnks for your help! If all else fails will reinstall iso, compaq xp operating system. Thanks again!

Hope that you are successful. Though I suspect a partial refund at best. If you can limit you loss to £5 to £10, it won't be too bad. Full refund will be excellent.

A few examples:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Dell-Latitude-E5400-Duo-T7250-2-00-2GB-RAM-80GB-HDD-WiFi-DVDRW-Win-7-32bit-/191947336626 Collection only

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Dell-Latitude-E5500-Laptop-Intel-Core-2-Duo-P7250-2-00GHz-2GB-Ram-160GB-HDD-/172325059759

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/HP-Compaq-nc6320-Intel-Dual-Core-2-GB-Ram-80-GB-HDD-Windows-Vista-WIFI-DVD/271976797856

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Toshiba-Tecra-M10-18M-14-1-Laptop-Intel-C2D-2-10GHz-160GB-2GB-No-OS-CD-Fault-/252391629922