HP Pavilion ze4900 Issues

[James Siler]

I have a friend who has the above mentioned laptop and it has all kinds of problems that I can't seem to figure out wether it be my own genral knowledge or what I have been Googleing. For starters it takes this thing about 4 to 5 minutes to actaully fully boot. There isn't a ton of stuff in start up either. That was my first thought. It won't load her profile. It gives an error message saying that it is unable to locate it along with some additonal info which some how I have got it to stop doing that. But i asked her if it was ok to do a complete restore back to like when it came out of the box, but with HP you can't do that. It needs a special disk (that she don't have) to do a factory restore. Also I have a windows mobile phone that when I do internet sharing on it when plugged into the laptop dosen't allow it on the net. This is the first computer that when I have hooked my phone to it and done internet sharing that it didn't work. It always work. Basically I am needing anyone who knows how to make this thing do a factory restore with out this disc. Hp wants $17 for it which I think is bull. Just trying to do a regular restore to a previous date fails everytime. Any help and or ideas will be greatly appreciated. Thanks everyone.

James.

 

[David Wolfson]

I've gotten HP laptops and have somewhat of a pile of them. I've found that slow booting is often due to zombie drivers that wait for adapters, e.g. bluetooth, that don't exist or software that hangs waiting for an internet connection. An old Quicken driver drove me bats a few years ago, for example.

IMHO $17 isn't way out of line for the restore disk specific to the model, since it's replacing the one that came with the new computer. But that aside, I've found the best first step with such problems is to boot with a recent Linux distro that allows test-before-install, like many do nowadays. That effectively tests all the hardware without any MSW issues. It also allows you to save files to backup media when Windows won't.

There are ways of debugging the boot process and zeroing in on problems, but unless there's something you want on the computer and can't save otherwise, then I've found that just restoring to a full working historical image backup saves lots of time.

 

[Mark Blue]

Actually I agree with Dave that you should suck it up and shell out the $17 for the restore disk, because a full restore is the way to go if you've tried everything else. My other suggestion would be to download Process Explorer here for a souped up way of looking under the hood: http://download.sysinternals.com/Files/ProcessExplorer.zip

Once you have it unzipped run the executable and look at which processes are hogging up resources during the boot process (the run away process hogging up the most CPU cycles) . You'll have to try and launch it as quickly as you can after the desktop appears, so "Pin" it to the Start menu where you can easily access it (right click the executable file and select "pin to start menu"). I'd stick with either the tree view (Control + T) or sort the column labeled "company name" to see which one you like best. Once you have the rogue process identified (look at CPU usage - 3rd column over - for the process using the most CPU cycles), then use Google to search by the process name to find out what the process does and experiences others have had that may shed light on the issue. Let me know if this helps or not.

 

[James Siler]

David and Mark, i wanted to thank you for your advice. It was much appreciated. It came down to the point of i had the drive wiped and windows reloaded on to the thing. A coworker of mine who does a computer buisness on the side took it and said it had a pretty bad virus on it that wipeing was the only thing he could do. He couldn't seem to get it. But the awesome news is this thing boots in 20 seconds now. Again though wanted to thank you both.

James