We're visiting Panama. I'm trying to help a person who lives here. I'm not sure if this laptop is a US model or Central American.
It's a CQ62-219WM. Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit.
The owner said it's been running slower and slower. With a Celeron 900 and 2 GB of RAM it was never a screamer. I fired it up. Yeah, it's really slow.
I suggested wiping it clean and doing a recovery off the hard drive partition. I wanted to make DVD's but all we had was DVD-RW's. So I did the recovery straight from the HDD.
Immediately after the recovery I installed Windows Defender, Firefox, and Chrome, then started Windows Update. After the second round of Windows Updates the laptop hung at an orange screen with the Compaq "C" icon. In the lower left corner there was some text. "Press ESC for Startup Options" I think it was. I pressed Esc. The text changed to "Esc...Pause Startup". And there it sat for 20 minutes. When I nudged the power button it shut down immediately.
The orange screen seems to be some sort of odd boot layer that HP created, because I don't get a response from any of the typical F keys during startup. It seems BIOS, Boot Menu, etc. are all hidden behind the orange screen.
After a few hours of screwing around with it, here's what I have:
If the laptop is on AC and battery:
Using Windows "Shutdown", then pressing the "on" button - hangs at the orange screen of death (OSOD)
Using Windows "Restart", it restarts without hanging so it's OK
If it's on AC with battery removed:
Windows "Shutdown", then the "on" button - OK
Windows "Restart" - OK
If it's on the battery only, unplugged from the AC power adapter:
Using Windows "Shutdown", then the "on" button - OSOD
Using Windows "Restart" - OK
Does this make any sense to anyone? The battery is an Anker, some aftermarket brand I've never heard of. I'm almost thinking there's something wrong with the "on" button, but the lappy starts OK on AC with no battery.
The only combination that consistently causes the OSOD is 1) battery plugged in to the chassis, and 2) Windows Shutdown (and then the "on" button) instead of Windows Restart.
Access to RAM, wi-fi, and HDD is easy so I checked those connections and re-seated the RAM. Blasted some compressed air through the fan vents. It doesn't seem to be clogged with lint AFAICT.