Trouble with a Dell PP06L laptop

[adrian]

I have a dell PP06L laptop that someone asked me to fix because it was slow. I scanned for viruses and spyware, and even went into safe mode, but it was still slow even after entering safe mode and scanning for the malicious files. I backed up his files and with his permission, reformatted everything with the help of my computer. I soon found out that the DVD drive didn't work, so I tried various ways to install XP including copying all of the XP disc files onto the hard drive, but it was no use - I couldn't get onto the hard drive even with a bootdisk. It can't be booted from either an external hard drive or external DVD burner because it doesn't support USB booting.

The laptop is a Dell PP06L with an Intel Pentium 4 processor, 256mb RAM, and a 30gb hard drive. The optical drive is a DVD-ROM drive, but it doesn't work.

If anyone has any suggestions as how to get this up and running, please let me know.

[JAvendan]

Re: Trouble with a Dell PP06L laptop

hello,

were you able to copy the xp files to the hard drive? if so, were you using the cd/dvd at that time?

if you were then the cd/dvd works

i would probably check the bios and see if it is set to boot from the cd/dvd drive. if you're lucky that is it and you're in business.

if not... and the files ARE on the hard drive try booting off of the floppy - if it has one - and try to run the setup program from dos.

... remember the days of fdisk, sys and format - wow!

good luck and let us know how it goes.

joel

[Cameron]

Re: Trouble with a Dell PP06L laptop

Pull the hard drive, throw it into a working laptop. Install windows, create a new hardware profile, put back into old laptop and boot. If you don't have another laptop handy go pick up a 2.5 to 3.5 converter for a few bucks ( Ebay), might have them at compusa, not entirely sure.

alternatively tell the owner that the dvd drive is bad and have him buy a new one.


also dells usually have a diagnostic partition, not sure whats on it but if it exist it might help.

[adrian]

Re: Trouble with a Dell PP06L laptop

Pull the hard drive, throw it into a working laptop. Install windows, create a new hardware profile, put back into old laptop and boot. If you don't have another laptop handy go pick up a 2.5 to 3.5 converter for a few bucks ( Ebay), might have them at compusa, not entirely sure.

The 2.5 to 3.5" converter is what I'm using on my laptop with an USB to IDE converter.

[Miulang]

Re: Trouble with a Dell PP06L laptop

Did you ask the owner of the laptop when they started noticing the system was slowing down? And did they try to add any more software packages to the HD just before they noticed the laptop start to slow down? Those would be the first 2 questions I would ask before thinking it was a hardware issue.

Miulang

[craigwatanabe]

Re: Trouble with a Dell PP06L laptop

Adrian if the DVD drive isn't working it can backdoor the BIOS and really confuse the heck out of it.

I had a computer that confounded me up the ying yang. I swapped virtually everything and was about to deep six the motherboard when I decided to unplug the IDE cable from the CD-ROM drive to the mobo.

Viola!! the BIOS booted up to the point where I got the "Missing NTLDR file" which is what I expected with no hard drive hooked up.

Before the system wouldn't even boot up. Turns out the CD-ROM drive was defective and somehow was confusing the BIOS when it tried to detect it.

I would replace the DVD-ROM drive with another and attempt to reboot to the POST. At the same time you need to reset the BIOS with the jumper.

As for installing the OS on the hard drive via another computer, that can work sometimes but typically it won't work especially if you transplant that hard drive into a proprietary motherboard. I've found that with E-machines you can load up the hard drive on a PC-Chip's mobo from another computer and run it on that (E-Machines) computer as E-Machines sometimes use Foxxcomm mobos.

Dell unfortunately uses propietory motherboards. At this point try removing the IDE cable from the motherboard to the optical drive and see if you can boot to POST. If you can hook up the IDE cable but remove the optical drive. If you can still boot to POST then the problem as you already found out is the defective DVD-ROM drive backdooring the BIOS.

[GeckoGeek]

Re: Trouble with a Dell PP06L laptop

256mb RAM

That's not really enough. I had some machines with only 256mb and it just never performed right. Had machines with half the CPU speed with better performance. Then I added memory. Don't remember how much, but the machines took off and "ran right". I consider 512mb the sweet spot but wouldn't say no to 1GB. Laptop hard drives are not all that fast, so limited memory just compounds the problem if you start thrashing.

The other thing to check very carefully is any sign that the drive may be going. Lately it's been my experience that dying hard drives don't always throw errors, but they do slow the machine down.

So more memory, perhaps a newer faster hard drive (the one that's in there may only be a 4800 RPM.) But then, maybe better off to just put the money toward a new machine.

[i-hungry]

Re: Trouble with a Dell PP06L laptop

Adrian if the DVD drive isn't working it can backdoor the BIOS and really confuse the heck out of it.

I had a computer that confounded me up the ying yang. I swapped virtually everything and was about to deep six the motherboard when I decided to unplug the IDE cable from the CD-ROM drive to the mobo.

I have seen something like this on a Dell laptop. The CD-drive would not always connect. So the bootup would be slow or sometimes never complete. I had to power down the computer and push the drive to re-seat the connection. It would boot up normally if the contact was right. It also helped to not pull on the cd-tray when it was out.

[GeckoGeek]

Re: Trouble with a Dell PP06L laptop

I've also seen cases where odd disks will confuse the heck out of Windows. But it was a case of stalled boot-up (something like 10 minutes or so until it gave up), not a slow computer.