Laptop Computer Problems HP

Laptop Computer Problems HP

Recently my daughter has been having trouble with her HP pavilion laptop. It is about 5 years old. It started running very slow. The hard drive reported a problem. To fix it I tried formatting it. No joy. The next step was to delete and recreate the petition that Windows was on. After reinstalling Windows there were no drivers for a lot of the devices including both Ethernet and WiFi. This meant no internet to get drivers. A quick look on the internet revealed that others were having the same trouble.

Researching the network for drivers revealed that HP’s site did no longer have the drivers needed. Trying to find drivers from another source caused many attempts to install different ones. These attempts all failed to install. Further research on the internet showed that HP corporatizes its drivers and software, the ones from the original device manufacturers. This caused so much frustration. I ended up having a song and dance on Facebook about it.

Bill Hughes

December 20 at 11:41pm ·

I’ve spent the last few days trying to fix a HP laptop. The hard drive had a fault and the computer wouldn’t run properly. So we reformatted the partition that was defective and reinstalled windows. Alas. No more drivers. I installed Ubuntu to test functionality. Everything worked fine. So windows and HP sucks. Don’t take my word.  You Just Google it.
I wouldn’t buy another one. Asus and Toshiba have been found to be quite good by me but may be you can find some flack about them on the net too.
If you have one of those dreaded HPs and are having trouble, Ubuntu might be the go. I used version 14.

My son was over for Christmas Eve. He told me that his girlfriend had the same problem with her HP. Its hard drive failed. All he did was chuck the old hard drive over his shoulder and installed a new one. They bought a fresh copy of Windows 7 and installed that. This worked fine. I got to thinking “What’s the difference here?” What I did next was pretend that the old hard drive was a new one by using a partition-er to remove all the existing partitions. Then I used a USB stick with a bootable ISO copy of windows 8 on it to install that OS. During the install, it failed when trying to connect to the internet.

This was obviously not a good install. The next move was a bit unorthodox. The computer had its lid shut, was turned over on its back, the battery was removed and the power cord pulled out. Why? We wanted to remove the hard drive at this point and connect it to another computer. I planned to use Paragon 5 to look at the partitioning and also test it. We could not find cables to connect it externally to my computer so we decided to go inside and hook it up there. To do this one of the hard drives had to be disconnected. Alas! Wrong one! My computer wouldn’t start. We couldn’t find the wright hard drive in cmos to boot from.

We had family staying over for Christmas. They had just arrived. Not wanting to have computers pulled apart all over the place, we decided to put them all back together again for the mean time.

Later that evening, when the visitors were out, I decided to turn it back on to see what would happen if I retyped the WiFi password and tried again. While running Ubuntu I used Virtualbox to see how Windows 7 would work in a virtual machine. I wasn’t happy with that, but the result was that the computer’s cmos had the virtual machine setting enabled. Knowing that I had cut the power in the middle of a process, the computer was started in cmos recovery mode.

The process came back to where it had left off. I was able to back up one screen and re-enter the WiFi credentials. When I pressed enter the laptop connected to my WiFi and the program obtained all the drivers from the internet. After Windows 8 finished installing, everything worked fine. After using Device Manager one could see the remaining “!” warnings disappear one by one. Because Windows was already registered to my daughter on this laptop, it just automatically registered again. No codes were input during the install. Windows does that now. All that is required is that you sign in to your Microsoft account.

So now I have egg on my face. Windows is fine with HP computers even though they corporatize their stuff. You just need to persevere with it. Get as much help from the internet as you can.