So, I thought of sharing my experience with all of you for laughter, maybe support but above all as a teaching lesson.

So, I return at my home to find a laptop sitting on the table with a note on it:
"Hello blah blah blah etc etc etc.... Please have a look of it ...blah blah blah etc etc etc.... I would find a technician but I trust your experience."

A friend of my sister, wanted me to look at her laptop. I do this occasionally for friends, free of charge. Generally, it is easy for me most of the time.

So, I open it up the next day, trying to fix it. The problem? Very specific: OLD MACHINE.

My big mistake, I tried to fix it instead of going with the easy solution: backup/format/reinstall.

The laptop is probably 8 years old with windows XP on. It had all sort of issues software alike so I thought I could fix it in the end; Viruses, corrupted boot, fragmented disk etc etc

Blue screen of death was the casual response to everything at first. Do note, every action needed a lot of waiting

After 3 days (ok, it was working alone most of the time), where I fixed everything software like, I ended up with the conclusion that this piece of rubbish also has hardware issues, unknown to me. Be it a cable? Who knows. You can't really know; so random.


CONCLUSION:
If you have an old pc with problems, start with the basic:
BACKUP
FORMAT
INSTALL OS afresh

Testing hardware parts with testing tools won't tell a hardware issue out of time 100% of the time. So just install a fresh os, install drivers and use it. If it works well for a few days, only then consider it fixed.

i have ran into these issues many times with my fathers pc it is soooo old and he is what i call click happy if it says click here he does lol... so after 6+ months of doing a weeklly format which took twice as long because of its age i just bought him a brand new laptop and a book called internet for dummies lol that was the best fix yet

Lol, he must be so grateful for the book

I don't understand why people hang onto these ancient machines when a midrange laptop that will perfectly perform in anything outside of high end gaming is pretty cheap these days.

MrSinister wrote:Lol, he must be so grateful for the book

he was lol

My experience with Laptops is..once over 3-5 yrs old.. have any trouble..replace and recycle the ancient machine.

My current PC is fifteen years old. A roommate angry with me infected it with Nanny software/ keylogger.

It took me forever to remove it, and then when I did - lo and behold, a ZeroAccess rootkit

I removed it! I could not believe it, but I was successful in that - but still problems

A cable within was scraped, apparently with a pen knife - and the ZeroAccess bug left doors open for more viruses

I had to replace the motherboard, a fan, and reinstall the XP software.

Works fine now though - but yes

Backup, Format, Reinstall

i have two of these laptops at my possessions at the moment. both are in the locker. and thats how i like it.

Had a problem looking for sound driver for an on board sound card from an ancient IBM desktop. Realtek + other bunch of generic drivers didn't work. Never got it fixed.