Question Tired of trying to fix this laptop, please help

[G6Laptop]

• I have a very old HP G6 2007tx laptop (i5 2450M, 4GB RAM, AMD Radeon 7670M 1GB graphics) which was a mid-range beast of its time 9 years ago back in 2012.

Recently I was running it normally one day when it shut down suddenly and then wouldn't turn on, only the power light went on and the wifi light stayed red and the screen went black and won't come up.

So I cleaned the heat sink, changed the fan and re-applied the thermal paste and did overall service and cleaning of the laptop. I also replaced the keyboard and battery since they were also worn.

The laptop powered on and worked fine for 2-3 days until one day I restarted it and yet again it showed only power light and the screen didn't turn on at all so I suspected overheating and tried starting once more after a minute and then it came back only to do the same thing on a second restart ultimately the screen completely stopped coming back and only the power light would show up so the exact same issue came back .

I made another attempt and repeated the thermal paste and cleaning and the laptop started to function normally for 2-3 more days and then suddenly the same cycle of issues appeared ultimately bringing it back to square one. May I know what could be the issue?

 

[AlHuneke]

FIrst off I would advise you to stop "cleaning" your laptop. This is rarely necessary and if proper ESD procedures are not followed, you can cause immediate or latent failures. That may be the source of your problem. My main question is what version of Windows are you running?

 

[G6Laptop]

FIrst off I would advise you to stop "cleaning" your laptop. This is rarely necessary and if proper ESD procedures are not followed, you can cause immediate or latent failures. That may be the source of your problem. My main question is what version of Windows are you running?

It has windows 7

 

[AlHuneke]

A couple of suggestions:

• It would be wise to update to Windows 10. I believe you can still do that for free. Look on the internet for info about how to do this. Window 7 (unless you have a corporate license) has not had security updates for nearly two years now. Virus scanners will not catch everything. You need the security fixes that Windows 10 has. You will need to back up all your data first and I would advise a "clean" install where everything on the disk is erased. This will include all your programs so make sure you have the means to reinstall them. Run BelArc advisor first and print out the report. It will capture most (not all) of your installed program names and SW keys associated with them, if there are.
• HP has good diagnostic tools (at least for newer machines). You might want to see if you can download and run those. Try to find the one that you boot into rather than the Windows version. It does a more complete job.
• Check the event logs. I'm trying to remember if Win7 is the same, but the current way to do that is to start Computer Manager and open the event logs. You may see a "critical" error when it shuts down (look at the times). Probably not as it is likely the machine just dies.

The random complete shutdown you describe if very hard to troubleshoot. See if you can tie it to anything---running particular programs, twisting the machine a bit, machine feels hot, phase of the moon, whatever. Let us know what you figure out.

 

[G6Laptop]

A couple of suggestions:

• It would be wise to update to Windows 10. I believe you can still do that for free. Look on the internet for info about how to do this. Window 7 (unless you have a corporate license) has not had security updates for nearly two years now. Virus scanners will not catch everything. You need the security fixes that Windows 10 has. You will need to back up all your data first and I would advise a "clean" install where everything on the disk is erased. This will include all your programs so make sure you have the means to reinstall them. Run BelArc advisor first and print out the report. It will capture most (not all) of your installed program names and SW keys associated with them, if there are.
• HP has good diagnostic tools (at least for newer machines). You might want to see if you can download and run those. Try to find the one that you boot into rather than the Windows version. It does a more complete job.
• Check the event logs. I'm trying to remember if Win7 is the same, but the current way to do that is to start Computer Manager and open the event logs. You may see a "critical" error when it shuts down (look at the times). Probably not as it is likely the machine just dies.

The random complete shutdown you describe if very hard to troubleshoot. See if you can tie it to anything---running particular programs, twisting the machine a bit, machine feels hot, phase of the moon, whatever. Let us know what you figure out.

Will do once I get it back which can only happen after re-assembly.

I had been using this infrequently and lightly for 9 years without service and I believe I used it with a faulty slow fan and blocked heat sink from early to mid 2020 when it would crash out of overheating and would need a similar wait but would almost always restart fine all at once (with a fan error message) at the time of booting.

To check the overheating I installed speedfan temp monitor which used to show temps at 90+ degrees and to overcome this I reduced it's performance to very low settings but still it would seldom face this issue of crashing and needing to wait before booting up again and I think it ultimately got fried one day and the screen stopped coming back and only the power light would come on, that's a hint where it all started.

I didn't have any experience with opening up a laptop until this time only when a local engineer did it before me and I somehow learned it from him else I would have cleaned it that time only.