Good day all,
I'm hoping someone here has an idea on a bit of what I'm thinking is a hardware problem. A colleague has a laptop that he got about 10-12 months ago that has been working fine (bar a loose hard drive a couple months back). Recently, however, it's been taking forever to boot. I was just working on it and it take anywhere from 5 - 10 minutes to show the Windows splash screen.
When you hit the power button from off, it will have all the lights go on. Power on, HDD flashes every few seconds and all that good stuff. Screen stays blank though. After a minute or so the cooling fan will spin up and be pretty audible before slowing down again. It does that a couple of times before finally flashing the screen where you can enter CMOS. It shows that briefly before going black again and then showing it again. Then it goes into the Windows splash screen and finishes booting fine.
I've disabled everything in MS config and rebooted (that didn't work out. Restarting the machine it just shows a black screen and does nothing. You have to shutdown completely or not at all) just to see if I could rule out any third party software. Still did it.
Next thing I tried was to enter CMOS configuration hitting F2 on his particular machine. Nothing for a while and then I noticed a white blinking cursor top right corner. But from there it did nothing.
I'm thinking it is something to do with BIOS or a dead CMOS battery? Any other thoughts?
I'm hoping someone here has an idea on a bit of what I'm thinking is a hardware problem. A colleague has a laptop that he got about 10-12 months ago that has been working fine (bar a loose hard drive a couple months back). Recently, however, it's been taking forever to boot. I was just working on it and it take anywhere from 5 - 10 minutes to show the Windows splash screen.
When you hit the power button from off, it will have all the lights go on. Power on, HDD flashes every few seconds and all that good stuff. Screen stays blank though. After a minute or so the cooling fan will spin up and be pretty audible before slowing down again. It does that a couple of times before finally flashing the screen where you can enter CMOS. It shows that briefly before going black again and then showing it again. Then it goes into the Windows splash screen and finishes booting fine.
I've disabled everything in MS config and rebooted (that didn't work out. Restarting the machine it just shows a black screen and does nothing. You have to shutdown completely or not at all) just to see if I could rule out any third party software. Still did it.
Next thing I tried was to enter CMOS configuration hitting F2 on his particular machine. Nothing for a while and then I noticed a white blinking cursor top right corner. But from there it did nothing.
I'm thinking it is something to do with BIOS or a dead CMOS battery? Any other thoughts?
