In April the AC power adapter for my laptop broke. The pin which connected the laptop to the adapter separated from the body of the adapter. It was a sad spring day.
After having committed to a mission of purchasing a new desktop while maintaining some money for books, the adapter replacement fell down the list of financial priorities.
Which is one thing great about Christmas. With my Christmas cash on my card after a trip to the bank, I went to Buy.com and bought a generic power adapter and cord. It arrived yesterday, allowing me to do something I haven't in six months. I turned on my HP dv6000 and that friendly Vista jingle filled my ears for the first time in over half a year on a warm winter day.
But after six months without my dear dv powering up, she slowed down sluggishly. Luckily Hewlet- Packard, like other computer companies, has a factory partitioned space on the hard drive loaded with all materials necessary to complete a full reformat and reinstallation of your operating system.
How many clicks did it take to select and run the easily identified option which set the laptop back to it's "factory shipped condition"? Five...
After a restart I hit the f11 key during start-up. This loaded some files similar to slipping a Windows CD into the drive which led to the HP recovery window.
"Use this program to recover your computer to its original factory condition." - "Next" - Click 1
"Would you like to launch Microsoft System Restore?" - "No" - "Next" - Click 2 & 3
"Would you like to perform a system recovery?...System recovery is a procedure for restoring your computer to its original factory shipped condition." - "Yes" - "Next" - Click 4 & 5...the rest was patience training.
The time it took to reformat and reinstall Vista and start-up into the operating system, 24 minutes...
Now Windows is loaded back up, the ol' dv is running well, but I have 70 Vista updates to install and configure. The only bust to the reboot, three years after purchasing my laptop Vista has bloated like a well-fed balloon.
However, the ability to reformat my machine while fully reinstalling my operating system within a half hour feels great. Although this operation has become common place for myself, as for other computer users, the advent of a recovery partition has streamlined the manual procedure.
Step 1
-Enter BIOS, select boot sequence 1 to cd-rom
-Save & Reboot
Step 2
-Open cd-rom quickly
-Put in Windows CD
-Closer cd-rom quicker
Step 3a
-If done fast enough mash keyboard when instructed to hit "any key to boot from cd."
Step 3b
-If not done fast enough, restart and consult 3a.
Step 4
-Patience training, windows has to load lots of files to reinstall the operating system.
-After windows files loaded follow on-screen instructions.
Step 5
-Select to reformat your hard drive
-Patience training, this will take 15 minutes to 30 minutes depending.
Step 6
-Wait for computer to automatically restart
-Patience training, wait for same windows files to load
-Follow on-screen instructions to install your operating system
Step 7
-Patience training, your Windows installation will take about 30 minutes.
Step 8
-Update.
See what I mean about five clicks? Feels great having a streamlined partition.
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dv6000 was 1 of 24 models that were manufactured and sold around 2006-2008. all of these models have a defective gpu that would overheat, first taking out the wifi, and eventually fry the whole logic board. There was a free fix if you could send it in before 3 years of buying it.
ReplyDeleteAnd just last month they recalled the batteries on many of these same laptops. So if you still have one, at least you can get a free battery before it bricks.
In related news, the former CEO of HP is running against Barbara Boxer for senate. Yeah, I really want the same woman who ran hp into the ground, selling terrible computers to run our state.