HP Laptop giving me problems

Easto · Post by **Easto** » Sun May 26, 2019 12:47 pm

We bought our granddaughter a lower end HP Laptop about 2 years ago. We didn't want to spend too much on a laptop for a 13 y/o girl, that is why we were trying to save a couple of buck. Anyway, this thing is not only a dog, it appears to have gotten even worse. I'm not sure what she did to it but I have the Laptop for a couple of days and I'm trying to get it to work properly. It's never going to be that fast, it's only an i3 intel thing. But I do know that something is wrong.

About 2 weeks ago I had initally tried to get it to work. I must have spend 7 hours trying to get the HDD from running at 100%. After spending way too much time trying to diagnose this thing I gave up. But in the meantime I kept searching the web. About the only thing other than a restore of the laptop to original setup is that I read that it might have something to do with the hibernate function. I'm going to try that and I'll report back. Believe me, I'v search every HP support group and tried every solution. Up to now, nothing.

Sorry if I'm rambling. it's just driving me crazy. And yes, I've looked at all the running processes etc. I've checked all the usually things that should be doing this and I can find nothing.

Rant over.

Easto · Post by **Easto** » Sun May 26, 2019 1:40 pm

I'm starting to think it's a bad HDD. Trying to do anything takes forever with the HDD at 100%. Updates are taking days.

Easto · Post by **Easto** » Sun May 26, 2019 7:49 pm

I think I may have found the problem. It seemed to be having a lot of trouble installing the latest batch of Win 10 updates. I was going back and forth with them trying to get them to install and I think something may have just got hung up. Also, after a while all of a sudden an HP update appeared in the update list. Anyway, it isn't quite a a normal state but it is usable, I just hope this was it.

Post by **Philip** » Mon May 27, 2019 7:57 am

sounds like an issue with their update, glad you figured it out

Post by **YeOldeStonecat** » Thu May 30, 2019 7:38 am

Rotating (spindle) hard drive? Yeah, we try to avoid those with Win10...SSD time!
8 gigs or more of RAM tight?
If it's 4 gigs...on a spindle hard drive...she'll struggle even on her best day.

Easto · Post by **Easto** » Thu May 30, 2019 9:41 am

I am thinking about switching it out for her sometime in the future. She doesn't need a huge SSD so I can probably save a bundle.

My initial problem was that there is no MS Win 10 serial number. Any recovery or reinstall is from a partition on the installed drive. I just need to find out how to keep and transfer her original OS to the new SSD.

Post by **Philip** » Sat Jun 01, 2019 3:08 am

Windows 10 has digital licenses, either attached to the hardware of the device, or your Microsoft account if transferable. You can install Windows by either cloning the hdd (a smaller SSD would require you to shrink some partitions), or fresh from a USB stick (you'd have to make the laptop bootable from the USB in the BIOS/EFI).