Laptop.

by **☠ ~ Aɳɳ ~ ☠** Mon 26 Aug 2013, 12:35

Hello!

A few weeks ago we found a laptop that someone threw away. Took it home because our laptop's batterie won't stay charged for more than 5 minutes but unfortunately it is a different model laptop and the battery doesn't fit. So I decided to see what this laptop is about.

It works, but that's about all I can say about it. It has XP professional SP 3 but it's full of errors. A selection of the errors that occur:
-Several "missing dll" messages pop up when it's started. Though that doesn't always happen and we don't always get the same missing dll's.
-It looks all right the first few minutes, but the more things we try to look at, the more errors appear. For example, text goes missing. All of it, half of it, or part of a sentence. The icons also go wacky. Eventually windows crashes.
-Sometimes it will be unresponsive. The cursor will move, the start menu will open, but windows explorer will not. Or it does, but then I will get an error message about "insufficient quotum" when I navigate to a subfolder.
-The USB ports don't function correctly. The mouse works, but it won't respond to USB flashdrives 50% of the time.
-The DVD drive doesn't function properly. Most of the time it won't open at all when there's a dvd present, or it'll tell me the drive is empty.

Everything works fabulously in safe mode, except for the dvd drive. But when I go to "hardware properties", I find no errors at all. I uninstalled the drivers and they were reinstalled the next time I started the laptop. With no effect. When I use safe mode with network, I can go online.

Obviously the first thing I tried is to reinstall windows, but that proved to be difficult since the dvd drive won't work. I prepared a flashdrive to boot and install windows from, since the laptop has the ability to boot from USB, and changed the BIOS accordingly, except it won't boot from USB. I can however access the files from USB (in safe mode), but after that I'm screwed since my XP installation files are old and don't have SP3 so I that doesn't help at all.
Another thing I tried is scf /renew, which briefly opens DOS but again, doesn't help at all.

I'm pretty much new to this type of trouble shooting so go ahead and give some advice.

Some of you will be wondering why I'm going through all this trouble, well, simply because I'm learning something. Besides, that laptop has better hardware than the one I'm currently using. And I'm enjoying it, but I'm almost out of ideas to be honest.

by Guest Mon 26 Aug 2013, 16:44

So no way to update the DVD drivers?
Oh, and you could create a partition inside your drive, then install your Windows in that partition.
From then on, you'd see if it is a hardware or a software problem. If the DVD drive still doesn't work, it needs to be changed...
Hope this helps! Wink

by **The_gh0stm4n** Mon 26 Aug 2013, 16:48

I know it might sound impractical, but what about an external DVD-drive ?

Though in this case it might be risky to actually buy such a thing, if you still don't know "everything" about that laptop...

//EDIT

But if your USB ports don't seem to work properly, then this might be useless again. Wat.

by Guest Tue 27 Aug 2013, 09:05

y u no use a virtual DVD drive: Deamon Tools. Then download a pirated copy of Windows 7 in ISO format then try it out?

Also see this: http://www.instructables.com/id/Install-Windows-7-without-USB-or-DVD-without-upgra/

by **☠ ~ Aɳɳ ~ ☠** Tue 27 Aug 2013, 10:15

Hello,

I don't want win 7 on that laptop, it's probably going to run terribly slow if I do. It has 512MB RAM. I may try that if everything else fails though I wouldn't like it. I see how my mother's laptop runs, which has specs similar to the laptop I'm working on but runs win 7. It's excruciating.

I may try another partition though. What I also did, was download windows xp sp3, see if I can repair the OS. That didn't work with the version I have since it's pre-sp1.

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