PCJake
Senior member
I'm trying to fix my brother's old (about 5 years) HP laptop. I'm not sure what all is in it. An AMD64 processor and 512MB of DDR PC2700 ram for sure. Here are the problems.
First of all, it turns off randomly, even when plugged in. Sometimes it will last an hour, sometimes it will only stay on for a fraction of a second. It often turns off before I start loading any O.S.
Secondly, it won't turn on if it's not plugged in, even if I charge it all night. On the rare occasion that I do make it into the O.S., it tells me that it's running on A.C. power and the battery is charging but remains at 0%. It's not a problem with the battery, though, because we have a replacement battery and using that one doesn't fix the problem.
It was running Windows XP, but that was corrupted during one of the random shut-downs. To prevent that from happening again I'm doing all my troubleshooting with a live version of Ubuntu. When I try to run the memory test off the Ubuntu CD, the laptop automatically reboots (instead of shutting down) every time, if that's any help. Thanks!
First of all, it turns off randomly, even when plugged in. Sometimes it will last an hour, sometimes it will only stay on for a fraction of a second. It often turns off before I start loading any O.S.
Secondly, it won't turn on if it's not plugged in, even if I charge it all night. On the rare occasion that I do make it into the O.S., it tells me that it's running on A.C. power and the battery is charging but remains at 0%. It's not a problem with the battery, though, because we have a replacement battery and using that one doesn't fix the problem.
It was running Windows XP, but that was corrupted during one of the random shut-downs. To prevent that from happening again I'm doing all my troubleshooting with a live version of Ubuntu. When I try to run the memory test off the Ubuntu CD, the laptop automatically reboots (instead of shutting down) every time, if that's any help. Thanks!
