Laptop woes

[ajrietveld]

I have an older hp pavilion dv6324us that freezes seemingly randomly. I'm considering updating the hdd and ram. Thinking the freezing is caused by a hdd failure. But my only concern is that the mother board is the cause of the problems. As this would be the first time I've opened a laptop I'm wondering if there is an easy to tell if the mother board is fried? I'm not too interested in pulling out the whole board.

I should probably just get a new laptop but I don't use this one enough to warrant a whole replacement. If I can get away with a ~$100 fix that'd be ideal.

 

[C1]

If it were me then I would test for freezes by loading & running DOS or WIN9X/ME start disk (boot from a USB floppy or better yet make a bootable CD). The hard drive is not used. You can also play some DOS games like Gorilla.bas to exercise the GPU. If the system freezes, then it is something with or on the MB (could even be memory or even CPU).

Some notebooks can be dfficult to open. I could never figure out how to open my friends HP-6748us. Took out a million screws, but the case would just not come apart. Cant imagine getting something like that back together again as dis-assembly is almost always easier than reassembly.

 

[ajrietveld]

I opted to use a Ubuntu trial boot disc that I had laying around and am running it from the disc. I've been putzing around for about 45 minutes and so far no freezes. The underside of the laptop feels as warm as it did running Vista.

Now I'm not sure if it's the hard drive or if it is the Vista install...before I buy a new hdd maybe I should do a full wipe and install of Ubuntu 11.10.

 

[Charlie98]

My old (2005) Dell was gagging on everything, it would take almost 4-5 minutes to boot into XP... and navigation? Might as well get a cup of coffee.

I did update HDD, replacing the tiny 40GB with a more suitable 160GB, and put a clean install of XP on it... with no Dell bloatware. I also put a slightly faster processor in, and new RAM but I think the biggest difference was the fresh OC install. For a 7-year old lappy, it's a rocketship now! I go from power button to navigation in 1 minute flat...!

Like you, I don't use it as much as I once did, and couldn't justify $400+ for a suitable replacement, but I'm perfectly happy now. Total cost was around $130, I think (Processor from eBay, RAM from 'egg, HDD NIW from eBay.)

Documented here.

You probably don't have much to lose at this point...

 

[El Tigre]

It is probably a operating system/software problem. especially if you have had no issues with the Ubuntu disc running.