Presario CQ61-110SA - Work this one out!!

Hey all,

I'm looking at a Presario CQ61-110SA for a friend and have been flummoxed by the problem. I agreed to take it in after someone else installed a new screen and then decided something had been spilled all over the keyboard and Mobo. No sign of any problems there. The guy had tried to install Vista on the machine but had obviously encountered problems and handed it back. So I had a look.........

- Trying to install Windows 7 on a clean drive and the damn thing hangs on the Windows load screen; the four coloured windows come together but then sit there. Left the machine overnight and found it in the same state next morning.

- Plumped for throwing XP just in case and the machine hung on installing devices. Retried numerous times and eventually it slipped through and loaded.

- I ran a gamut of tests on memory, HD and CPU (including 6 hours on Hot CPU Pro) all returning no errors. So tried to load Win 7 from XP as an update; install hangs on preparing to setup.

- It has an utterly useless BIOS with most of the options greyed out (F.23) so I thought I'd flash to a more customisable BIOS. Using Insydeflash the program just hangs after starting, not a dickie bird from it. Cant force a close and when trying to shut down Windows XP the machine hangs and forces me to hard reboot.

- I'm thinking it of picking up a new memory module but thought I'd throw it out there in case anyone had any bright ideas?

Thanks in advance.

DB

 

I hope others will give suggestions.

One thing you might give a try would be to boot it from a Live Linux CD or USB flash drive and see if that will load to the desktop. That might tell you something about whether it is capable of doing some heavy processing similar to a Windows installation.

Linux Puppy is fairly small and can be written to CD using Imgburn's "Write Image File to Disc" option. Then boot from the CD and see if it stalls or loads to the desktop.

You could also put it on a USB if you prefer, I could link a program.

Either way you don't install Puppy but run it directly off the CD or USB. You just want to see if it can completely load so you know how the laptop's hardware is working.

Edit: I just reread your post. So XP was running OK after you got it installed? You just prefer Win7, correct?

 

And one other question, when you ran the update from XP to Win7 was that starting the update from within XP or did you boot from the CD to do the update? (Just trying to figure out if you were running from an OS loaded in RAM or not.)

I'm not sure of what could be the next step in troubleshooting, you already ran memory tests, so I hope others will give suggestions since the machine appears to run XP and it is an installation hang problem.