my crappy old laptop

[00dave]

Back in 2004 I bought myself a laptop to keep myself amused as I travelled the world with my new found career. It's a compaq Presario R3000 and besides it's inability to play any game whatsoever without blue screening, it has been a reliable media hub during my travels, but unfortunately it's developed what seems to be a terminal fault.
It started last year when sometimes I couldn't charge the battery or run it off the mains even when it was plugged in. I found that unplugging and plugging it back in sometimes worked and with this little method I've kept it alive until last week. Now it totally refuses to charge or run off the mains, and as the battery is now completely dead I can't use it at all. I can get the charging light to flash but it doesn't seem to mean anything and I even bought a new mains charger at a cost of £50 which turned out to be a waste of money.

Now my question is does anybody know of why this might be happening and if there's a quick fix for it, and also if there's a way of retrieving the information from the laptop while it has no power.

P.S. my computer knowledge is very limited so explain to me as if you were explaining to an elderly person

 

[Yaka]

to retrive the info of the hdd pop into maplins and get a 2.5 ide to normal ide and molex adaptor.

as for the power issues some lappys have a board seprate for power coming in some are built in to the main board. youll have to opened yours up to find out. if its seprate then hunt down the part for it on ebay.

oh and shame on you for buying and @offical@ charger you can get cheaper ones from farnell and maplins.


also kryt is well handy with fixing lappys give him a shout

 

[Kryten]

Aye, could have found you a charger for cost of a beer and postage too - had a box full of the buggers at work!

Yaka hit the nail on the head, the circuit in the machine that handles the charging (and discharging) of the battery is often separate - it also handles the switching between running from mains and battery; and they also fail before the battery's end of life too.

There's not a great deal that can be done about it by a consumer or someone not wanting to pull the thing apart. However, having a bit of a hunt around my service manuals for that particular machine, it appears it's built onto the motherboard.

But yeah, grab an 2.5" ide to 3.5" ide adapter, then you can pull the drive out (from a plate just a little larger than the drive is on the underside of the machine). plug it into an IDE channel in your desktop and it should hopefully pick up leaving you free to copy what you need from it.


Maplin > IDE to 2.5 Laptop IDE Cable

are the ones I used at the old place, although my own adapter is a little board.

Or, you could grab a cheap 2.5" USB drive (just the case without the drive) and slot it in there so you can stick it in your USB port - no drivers required and a bit more convenient.

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=44932&criteria=2.5
(But a bit expensive!)
Or, from ebay, as an example:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Silver-2-5-HD...ryZ86759QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

The latter might be the easiest bet, with the added bonus you've then got a drive to use for backup purposes if you need it and don't want to get it back in the laptop

Not sure what you intend to do with the laptop, but I'd be happy to attempt repair if you can get it to me - god knows how much local places will charge, and more to the point with these little Asus EEE machines and other cheap laptops for 200 notes around, they might all just write it off.

 

[00dave]

I think I'll use this as an excuse to buy a new laptop, thats why I wanted to know if it was a quick fix. Looking in PC world yesterday I noticed they're a hell of a lot cheaper than mine was back in 2004. But big thanks for all those ways of retrieving the info on the hard drive, that's all I was really after. I'm pretty sure I backed everything up with my big rig but my 'special me time vids and pics' are on the laptop only

lol I would have been able to run it down to you just over a year ago Kryten I used to live in peterborough and regularly drove through Kettering.

 

[Kryten]

Ah well

Either way, grab yourself some money back on your laptop through Ebay - regardless of it's condition, take plenty of photos, state exactly what you've already told us here, keep as much stuff with it as you can and stick it up for spares/repair. You might get 50, you might get 100 for it - it may well be an issue someone has experience fixing and will happily pay for it.
That's a nice chunk of money to help fund a new machine or some

 

[dysfunction]

heh I might do this...I have an old laptop (well over 10 years old) and it still runs but unfortunately I cant get any data off of it as the floppy drive doent work anymore and there are no USB ports!! (Yes its pre USB!)

Ive tried using a cable to link the two PC's but it that fails as well...

 

[MYstIC G]

Ive tried using a cable to link the two PC's but it that fails as well...

Laplink FTW!

 

[dysfunction]

Laplink FTW!

Yeah I tried that but cant get the software onto the laptop due to the buggered floppy drive!
It also wont remotely install via the cable link no matter what I try...

 

[00dave]

Noticed another problem with my dead laptop, there's still a DVD in the drawer and it won't release without power

 

[nath]

There should be a pinhole on the bezel of the dvd drive - unwind a safety pin and shove it in there, that'll eject it manually.

 

[Yaka]

all dvd and cd drives have a pin hole near the or on the eject tray. stick needle gently in and push a little and the tray should release. itf its a slot loading drive then youl need to hold down the pin and pull the dvd out gently with some tweezers

 

[nath]

Muahah, beat you to it yaks, although I'll let you off as you included info about a slotloader

 

[00dave]

hmm found a small hole next to the ejest button, shoved a pin in it and nothing happened

 

[nath]

Shove harder, it's quite a rigid button and it'll only pop out a cm, just enough to drag the rest out yourself.

 

[00dave]

ah got it, safety pin wasn't strong enough, precision screwdriver ftw

 

[MYstIC G]

paper clip tbfh

 

[00dave]

Didn't have one

So can anybody recomend me a decent laptop for not too much money?

 

[dysfunction]

how about this one: Lenovo 3000 N200 TY2ECUK From Laptops Direct

 

[pikeh]

Although I would rarely recommend buying anything from PC world, They have a pretty reasonable Laptop sale on atm.

 

[Yaka]

Muahah, beat you to it yaks, although I'll let you off as you included info about a slotloader

as for pcw lappy sale, thats coz one of the bean counters in thier accounting depts realised they had far too many lappys in stock