Girlfriend dropped her laptop

Yeah, women... Honestly ;P Anyway, she dropped it a while back, from table height onto the patio.

Now, it turns on, and loads up VERY VERY VERY slowly.
Then it stays on a black screen for a while.
Then the mouse will appear for a while, then the Vista loading circle for while.
Then she can log in, still takes a long time.
Once she's logged in, explorer.exe crashes, and you can 'End now', and then this cycle will continue.

In safe mode, it loads up and works.

Any idea what part is likely to be damaged and causing the problem?





Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/23/2009 03:15AM by superchargednut.

And i thought this was gonna be a joke :p

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"Trulli was slowing down like he wanted to have a picnic" LOL

My guess would be that a part that was damaged when she dropped it is causing the problem.

Sim

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All Hail The New York Giants - Winners of Superbowl XXI, XXV and XLII!

"I'd love to know what goes on in that crazy head of yours sometimes, Sim..." - Locke Cole

Edited the first post.

sasjag Wrote:
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> My guess would be that a part that was damaged
> when she dropped it is causing the problem.


This man/woman/transvestite speaks the truth.

I dunno. If its under any kinda warranty send it in, or if not, open er up!


The Flanker is gone.

I'm no expert on these things, but it sounds like hard drive damage to me. Hard drives are pretty sensitive to shocks/impacts, and the laptop's slow/erratic behaviour in standard mode sounds consistent with hard drive problems.

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EC83 Wrote:
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> I'm no expert on these things, but it sounds like
> hard drive damage to me.

This.

Only other possible cause to spring to mind would be that the CPU heatsink has almost come away, so the CPU has just about crawled to a halt to avoid completely melting itself, but that's extremely unlikely. They do tend to throttle down when overheating, but before getting this slow they shut themselves off completely.

Stop her using the laptop until you can get another hard drive. All it will do is lose more data. Get someone to take the old drive out, but keep hold of it, and reinstall whatever Windows came with the laptop (a lot easier if the laptop came with recovery CDs or DVDs... hopefully it's not a cheap laptop with the recovery data on a 2nd partition on the hard drive, or you're going to have to reinstall Windows the longer way, manually looking for drivers and such).

When you've got the system working again, plug the old hard drive into USB caddy such as this (we'll check to see if it's SATA or PATA before we order) so we can rescue any documents and data she might need.

If you're by yourself on this one, post the laptop make a model (it'll be on the underside - post a photo if you're not sure which number) and we'll start guiding you through the rest.

The good news is that it looks as though the hard drive is the only victim, so unless it's an old laptop she was thinking of replacing in the near future, it'll be relatively cheap to fix. Might just take a little while to do it.

Try to seducedthat girl, it might fix her problem

micky-cannonball Wrote:
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> Try to seducedthat girl, it might fix her problem


You are an idiot.

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[www.mediafire.com] Some say you should click it, you know you want to. [www.gp4central.com] <----GP4 Central

Thanks very much Gav

'Hopefully it's not a cheap laptop with the recovery data on a 2nd partition on the hard drive'.

Hmmm... Unfortunately it was a Christmas present and therefore it's an Advent. I have a slightly newer version of the same one than her though, and I don't think my recovery data is on a 2nd partition.

Mine's an Advent 5301.

(I know they're awful )

my mum has an advent laptop for a few years now, its had problems since getting it, its mega slow, it doesnt work with out it being plugged into the mains, took it back to pc world and they said there was nothing wrong it, it literay takes about 40 minutes after arriving at desktop to be useable.

Gav... Since (I think) safe mode works alright, could I not just load that up, then back-up her files onto my external HDD, and then shove a new HDD in her laptop?

You could (though safe mode doesn't always like installing new hardware, I think drives are fine), but don't run that hard drive any more than is absolutely necessary, or you won't be getting any files off it.