Author Topic: my ubuntu laptop has been fixed  (Read 771 times)

a long time ago, I got a free laptop. It is a HP Pavilion dv7. Pretty neat computer IMHO, it has a mouse pad and stuff so it works. well now it does. When I got it, it didn't turn on. So it rotted in my basement for a few months. Then I got the courage to open it up.
The RAM was shattered. Seriously just there was pieces of it everywhere, a few minutes of tweezering later, I got the RAM cleared out and put in 2x2GB RAM. I blew some chips out and then closed it back up. Then I looked at the wires of the screen that were squirting out the sides. I took the bezel/bevel whatever you call it off it and had a local technician resolder it on (my soldering skills need work).
Then I put the plastic cover whatever the forget you call it on the top and turned it on. Woohoo! it had some crappy Windows Vista Starter Edition. Oh and let me mention it took 3 days to turn on. So after that I realized it has to be a different problem. So I turned it off (MISTAKKEE) and completely took the bottom off. It was all gunky and stuff but nothing seemed to be broken. I double checked everything and nothing seemed to look at all damaged. I scrapped it back together and took out the battery. This time it turned on in 2 hours! So I realized it had to be the battery doing something loving weird. Then I accidently did some update thing and it had to restart.
forget. Wait what? If the software restarted the computer, it would restart fine. Though if you restarted it with the pwoer button it clunked out. Interesting. I put the battery back in and turned it on. When it came on I found out WITH THE BATTERY IN that my laptop didn't recognize it. An order later (it was like 30 bucks) I got the new battery and it turned on in 30 seconds, which was great. So I wiped it and put on Ubuntu and did my little customizations, and now I have my little Bubuntu Laptop updating (203 updates, yikes!) besides me.

discuss miracles

I love fixing up scrap computers like that. I have a few in the basement that I host BL and MC servers on.

My sister just bricked a similar laptop. Luckily only the hard disc died, but I almost ordered a SATA drive instead of an IDE drive. I also bought an extra GB of ram which got here today.

Currently it's running Puppy Linux as a RAM occupant until the new HDD gets here.

That sound like a pain in the ass though, must've been pretty frustrating.

« Last Edit: February 26, 2013, 10:04:24 PM by dorkdotdan »

I just got one a few weeks ago that kept just turning off so I tore the PSU apart and replaced some stuff like the fan in there. It's probably a bad idea to mess with PSUs too much though..

I wish I could find free semidecent computers to fix. I did get a cool tv once though.

I wish I could find free semidecent computers to fix. I did get a cool tv once though.
I have tons. All of our computers except the one my dad built and our TV computer are pre-2008 and are slow as forget.

I might overclock them just a little bit to get a little a bit more life out of them.

Don't take this offensive but could you fix your wall of text? I want to read it but I already have a headache. :<

Don't take this offensive but could you fix your wall of text? I want to read it but I already have a headache. :<
he got a laptop with vista but the ram and stuff was smashed and broken, he ordered new things and installed Ubuntu on it, it works yay!

he got a laptop with vista but the ram and stuff was smashed and broken, he ordered new things and installed Ubuntu on it, it works yay!

Woo! I would say total waste of money and bad OS but that's my opinion! yaay!

Woo! I would say total waste of money and bad OS but that's my opinion! yaay!
all starter OS' are horrible

Woo! I would say total waste of money and bad OS but that's my opinion! yaay!
Ubuntu isn't a bad OS, there are better distros though.

Blegh I only have the discs of
Windows XP/Vista/7/8 (all ultimate)
Windows Server 2003
Arch Linux
Ubuntu
AnonymousOS (as a joke, the thing is identical to backtrack though riddled with malware and stuff)
Mac OS X 10.5/6

How did you get it free?

How did you get it free?

Get what free?

Blegh I only have the discs of
Windows XP/Vista/7/8 (all ultimate)
Windows Server 2003
Arch Linux
Ubuntu
AnonymousOS (as a joke, the thing is identical to backtrack though riddled with malware and stuff)
Mac OS X 10.5/6

Uh.. okay? If there's something you need you can just burn it?

Its the best feeling in the world to fix a broken computer. :D