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Attempts to use a damaged laptop...

By: Decomposed in 6TH POPE | Recommend this post (0)
Sun, 14 May 23 4:46 PM | 54 view(s)
Boardmark this board | 6th Edition Pope Board 		Msg. 42525 of 58554
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I finally worked on the HP Elitebook last night. I bought it at auction for $32, you'll remember, and it has a badly damaged screen. But with an external monitor, I was able to see what I was doing and get it to boot. No password! That made it easy. And it has Windows 7 Professional, sort of. More on that in a bit.

Booting showed that the mouse pad was also broken. I was able to move the pointer around, but the left and right buttons on the pad don't do anything. It was only a minor inconvenience. I pulled the track ball and dongle from my Dell laptop, plugged the dongle into the Elitebook's USB port and the problem was solved.

The Operating System is Windows 7 Professional. But when the computer boots, it complains that the operating system does not pass Microsoft's validation tests and "is not genuine." The message is even emblazoned on the desktop background. Nice.

About that, I found:


The most likely reason for the "This copy of Windows is not genuine" problem is that you are using a pirated Windows system. A pirated system may not have as comprehensive functions as a legitimate one. Most importantly, there are security holes, which can put your computer at great risk. So, be sure to use a legitimate Microsoft Windows operating system.
Oh well. This OS came with the computer. It was probably stolen from an addict. I figured I'd take care of it when I reinstalled Windows.

The computer had a 32 gig C: partition and a 470 gig D: partition. It had Libre Office and a bunch of games: Steam, Diablo III, StarCraft, etc. Nothing else. Reinstalling Windows won't do any harm. I retrieved the Windows installation dvd (Thanks, micro!) and . . .

The DVD player doesn't work. It won't open, even with a pin in the override hole. The eject button won't push in. The OS doesn't see that there is a DVD player. So it's about as dead as it gets.

I had an external DVD player, so I plugged that in. Problem solved.

I tried to install Windows Professional on the C: drive and couldn't. It complained that it needed at least 8 gigs of space. The 32 gig partition had just 1.5 gigs free. So I spent half an hour manually removing all the games, Libre Office, Google Chrome, and anything else that wasn't needed. C: still only had 3.5 gigs free. I ran the disk cleanup utility and that freed a few gigs, getting the disk to 6.8 gigs free. That was enough for Windows 7 HOME edition, so I went with that.

The installation failed after about 15 minutes. It claimed there was corruption on the installation DVD. But the installation was kind enough to roll back its changes so that the computer would still boot. I removed the disk, gave it a good cleaning, started the computer again and . . . drive C: now had just 3 gigs of free space. And this time, the disk cleanup routine didn't help at all.

I have no idea why C: is so full. It has about 28 gigs in the C:\Windows folder, and I'm uncomfortable with going into the folder and deleting things by hand.

My next thought was to install Windows Professional on the D: partition. It, after all, had tons of free space. I formatted it and began the install. I entered the product key data from the laptop's underside, got to the last stage of the installation and . . . I received an error that this version of Windows is no longer supported by Microsoft and the product key is out of date. I think that's ridiculous and unethical, but it's typical of Microsoft.

My wife, genius that she is, recommended backdating the computer to ten years ago. That would probably work, except that I can't get into the BIOS if I can't see the screen, and the external monitor doesn't begin to work until after the OS is partly loaded. The BIOS is only accessible *before* the OS loads, so I was shot down again.

It was 4 a.m. by then and I'd had enough. I booted the computer a final time, going into the "not genuine" operating system. I installed Microsoft Office 2007. That went fine, but the computer now has just 1.5 gigs on its C: partition.

Since I can't get into the BIOS to reset the hardware clock, I reset the date via the OS. I set it to May 14, 2017. That's the only other year since Windows 7's debut where May 14th was a Sunday. I figure I should at least have the days of the week be right. But next year is a leap year and then it will be wrong again. Sad

I shut down and went to sleep. At some later time, I'll try again to install Windows Professional on the D: partition. I don't have any illusions about it actually working... the installation is bound to see through my kludgy clock reset, but I figure I'll at least give that a try and see what happens.

I've got the system working, and I *could* use it for my book database this way. But I'm not sure that I will. With the laptop's many problems, I'm not even comfortable with putting linux on it. After all, the external monitor doesn't start working until the operating system is partly up! And working drivers for the trackball and external DVD player might not be available in linux.

The only other option is to replace the broken monitor. I can probably do that for $30, but I'm not feeling enthused. After all, just how much is a broken 12-year-old laptop actually worth?




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Gold is $1,581/oz today. When it hits $2,000, it will be up 26.5%. Let's see how long that takes. - De 3/11/2013 - ANSWER: 7 Years, 5 Months


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