How I brought my 8 year old laptop back to life
I am not sharing this story, because I found an extraordinary solution to laptop problem.
I am sharing this so that the next time, you think that your laptop has died, and it needs a technician’s attention, you don’t give up on trying. It’s good to experiment by yourself once in a while.
The Pledge
Don’t cringe please, I just recently watched that masterpiece, again.
Yes, something very ordinary.
An 8 year old laptop, not working, obviously. The last I touched this laptop was to remove Ubuntu and factory reset it to Windows 7 Basic Home (yeah). I thought that it could be of some use at my home.
As soon as I boot it up after reinstalling factory image and logging in, there is lag in every UI operation, so much so that I had to wait 10 minutes to even open an application and move mouse pointer, and then that application would stop responding.
No option apart from force-restart. And after that the same story continues. I could not spend much time on it then.
The Turn
Fast forward to lockdown diaries, I start my laptop, only to encounter the same problem again, along with some beeps while booting up. I couldn’t run any diagnostic tool as well, as the laptop wasn’t responsive at all. My mom urged me to throw it away.
As expected, the beep codes, didn’t help. I tried to find a pattern, but it was an unmeasurable stream of beeps. Booting it in Safe-Mode, also didn’t help as it will still unresponsive after booting.
The hackerman inside me urged me to try and open the windows in Safe Mode with Command Prompt.
Lo and behold, the same stream of beeps, but this time I found the culprit. It was the keyboard, hiding in plain sight, emitting a stream of \.
The Prestige
The next step was figuring out how to disable the keyboard without disconnecting it. If you thought it was that simple, you are wrong.
Reaching
- Group Policy Editor — to disable keyboard
- Keyboard Driver Setup —for setting an incompatible driver
was looking impossible due to unresponsiveness. The keyboard stream was apparently blocking UI thread of windows. I could somehow reach the setup by banging the keyboard :D to replace the driver, which disabled the keyboard, but it still wasn’t as responsive as it should be.
I also tried installing Ubuntu to find an alternative solution, but it wouldn’t go beyond installation screen.
Dad, pass me that screwdriver.
Disconnecting the keyboard, was the only solution I could think of.
And It worked. I had ordered a cheap external keyboard to replace the one inbuilt. The laptop was finally responsive enough to perform some essential tasks. It can now be put to some good use, and prove robustness of Lenovo laptops.
Tools that can help
- https://www.passmark.com/products/keytest/ — If your system is responsive
If there was any other solution, please let me know in the comments.
