Here’s a good one. Working on a computer for a co worker, 5 year old hp, vista home. They tell me it’s dead and wont do anything. I Plug it in it, it boots up, get to the login screen, select the user and enter the password, get the starting windows screen and the machine freezes.
Turn off the machine, let it sit for a couple minutes, now it won’t boot past the hp bios splash screen. More troubleshooting to follow tonight.
Customer just informed me that they have a history of frying motherboards and this is their 5th computer in the last 10 years. lol
IF you can get in the BIOS test the RAM and HDD assuming it’s an option. You can also use the HP Vision Diagnostic Disc and run a scan (LINK) of the hardware. If the customer is going through computers every two years, no offense but the customer shouldn’t be operating one. Do you know if they’ve tried cleaning it with a vacuum at all? Sounds stupid but it will definitely fry MOBOs or PSUs. If possible see if you can connect the drive to another computer.
The RAM tests ok, the HDD isn’t visible when I boot to seatools from CD, but I can access files on the drive when I connect it to another working pc. Given the condition of this pc they haven’t contemplated cleaning it. I had to clean it out with canned air before I could start working on it. I think it’s time for fixboot and then a clean install if that doesn’t work.
are they smokers?
are all the fans and heatsinks clean and fans spinning freely inside?
i cant tell you how many computers i have had with issues and the cpu or cooling fan and heatsinks are plugged up with dust and that nasty smoke stink stuff.
fist thing I would do, get a linux boot disc and attempt to recover the files on the disk before continuing. If you can recover files by copy/paste in linux, then that’s a good sign that the hard drive is still in useable condition. Once the files are backed up, run some diagnostics against it and see what errors come up. Some Linux boot discs like Knoppix have built-in tools for that sort of thing.