(Another) laptop problem

flogen

My laptop has been on its last lets for some time now, and now I fear it has died once and for all...

Basically the battery died on my (as happens after 20 minutes without a power source), and I left it to charge, while it was charging I tried to turn it on and the light showing the power source was connected went off; the laptop died pretty quickly. I left it to charge fully (light went green) and turned it on again... again the power cable light went off but I figured the battery would hold me over until I got to the start up screen, it didn't. The battery seemed to charge up fully again, but wouldn't last long enough to get to the desktop... no matter what the cable doesn't seem to bring power to the laptop (Except when it's turned off...!!!)

So from what I can gather the battery is ****ed and the power cable connection is too... I'd be happy to **** it in the bin and get a new one (Even though I can't afford one), but, as always, there's a ton of information that I need to get off the old laptop.

Anyone know what's going on here? Is there still life in the old girl? Can I even get it on enough to get the files I need?
It's a HP compaq NX9010 by the way... Win XP Pro SP2, has a decent firewall, virus scan and all that too, so I think it's a hardware problem rather than software.

Thanks

peterk19

you could put the Harddrive into another pc and take the files you want off it all you need is to get an adapter so you can put the drive on a standard ide cable
Pete

pclancy

defo a hardware problem, with that age laptop it could just be the battery is dying/dead and bats often cause those exact problems. You can get new batteries from between €50-€100 new on Ebay or a company called ICS in Ballymount will get them from Compaq for you, might cost a bit more. If that doesnt work it could be invertor or a few other parts inside the laptop that are gone and that would involve more money and getting it looked at by a pro. Id say try the new battery, they are good laptops and the few ive fixed with similar problems were cured by new batteries. Your data is all still okay so worst case if you retire the laptop you can remove the harddrive (very easy just two screws) and plug it into a PC to remove the files. You'll need an IDE adapter to do this (ebay or peats/pcworld) but its not too difficult.

flogen

pclancy wrote:

defo a hardware problem, with that age laptop it could just be the battery is dying/dead and bats often cause those exact problems. You can get new batteries from between €50-€100 new on Ebay or a company called ICS in Ballymount will get them from Compaq for you, might cost a bit more. If that doesnt work it could be invertor or a few other parts inside the laptop that are gone and that would involve more money and getting it looked at by a pro. Id say try the new battery, they are good laptops and the few ive fixed with similar problems were cured by new batteries. Your data is all still okay so worst case if you retire the laptop you can remove the harddrive (very easy just two screws) and plug it into a PC to remove the files. You'll need an IDE adapter to do this (ebay or peats/pcworld) but its not too difficult.

Many thanks, the machine got itself sorted out after a while; it seems as though the battery now has almost now power storage abilities at all, if I unplug for even a few seconds it goes into standby mode, but it works once it's plugged in.
I'm in the process of moving all my important files onto iPod so I have some kind of back up.
Thanks for the info on new batterys; frankly this piece of crap has so many nigly details that I'm keen to replace it as soon as I can so investing another 50 or 100 euro into it isn't something I want to do unless I have to; it's dying a slow death and is showing its age from a specs perspective anyway...

(once I get a new lappy I plan on using it to experiment with Linux, just for the fun of it and to say that I gave an OpenSource OS a chance!)