Recent content by mikef845

The battery could be faulty. The only way to tell is to replace it.

Does the unit have a CMOS battery? They are well known for dying and stopping the laptop from working properly.

It could be that the disk is incorrectly inserted. What happens when you remove the new hard disk and turn it on? (No HD in the computer) What happens when you put the old HD in and turn it on?

Can you do a hard reset with a paperclip? Somewhere on the laptop might be a small hole. It should be documented in the user guide. I usually turn on the laptop and wait 10 seconds. You might have to gently turn the laptop on its side to get to the small hole. Inside the hole is a small switch...

Most laptops have power throttling. They are affected by a bad battery or incorrect power supply. This happens to any brand or model: http://www.tomsguide.com/forum/id-3587293/dell-xps-9560-gtx-1050-4gb-low-fps-horrible-performance.html#xtor=EPR-8886 Have you tried shutting down the laptop...

A handy anti-virus program to run is TDSSKiller: https://usa.kaspersky.com/downloads/tdsskiller It claims to find and remove rootkits which other anti-virus programs might miss. It can be run once a year or maybe once a month. It only takes a few minutes to run. It doesn't leave anything...

It could be wear and tear from plugging things in many times. But it sounds like the USB 2 controller has died. Most people just buy a USB 3 hub that can handle SDCards. Much easier than trying to repair the laptop.

That's a lot of power for a laptop. A desktop with a graphics card can run off 150W. The laptop has to get rid of that 230 W of heat. It could burn out the laptop. If you can do without one of the RAM sticks, one could be removed to reduce power usage. Most games will run happily with 16 Gb...

A repairable laptop might be a good idea. Portable / light / thin laptops usually aren't repairable. If it's repairable, it will have screws on the bottom so it can be dis-assembled. An Ultrabook might be underpowered. Video/photo editing usually benefits from a quad core processor and a high...

Gaming kills laptops. Anything under 85C should be safe. But if the temps are under 65C most of the time, it might extend the lifetime of your laptop.