Been running through laptop options to cope with sending the HP Envy back to have the hard drive failure addressed. Otherwise, I’ll be without a working machine for my writing for ten days.

We have an iPad mini 4, which will work for surfing the net and checking email, but they’re pretty limited in other applications, so I dragged old laptops into the light. The Dell had potential. It was a decent running machine that just ended up being replaced on a whim because it was five years old. I remembered the hard drive password but couldn’t recall the Windows password. That didn’t worry me. Using either brute force or a password recovery program, I figured I could pry the password out of the machine or reset it so I could access it.

I attempted the first and easiest way, seeing if I could access the tables through the Administrator. Nope. Then I tried getting around that via Safe Mode with Command Line. Nope. Apparently, if the Administrator has a password set, that path is closed.

Next, I addressed it through using a boot UBS with a password recovery/reset program. Nope. That didn’t work because now I was getting a kernel failure report.

Nuts.

I didn’t feel like using brute force for cracking at that point. I was sort of depressed. So I powered up the Dell’s replacement, the old Thinkpad. It had been displaying remarkably similar failings to the HP Envy, with intermittent connectivity issues, slow browsers, lots of fan running. Besides those, it had developed the dreaded Blue Screen of Death with an IRQL_NOT EQUAL_OR LESS message.

That needed to be fixed before anything could be addressed so I’ve spent about twelve hours in the last two days seeking the fix. I appeared to have found and resolved it today.

1. Oddly, my Network Connections folder was empty. I found some suggestions for that issue. The first was a REGEDIT solution. It worked. After rebooting, the folder was once again properly populated. I clicked on Chrome. Boom. BSOD.
2. I used the same REGEDIT solution, then went on to the other REGEDIT suggestions. The rest of my entries were correct. Yet, the problem remained, the folder would populate, I would open Chrome, and I would experience a BSOD, and the folder would be empty again.
3. Next was deleting the network adapters through the Device Manager. Okay, I began going through them, only to find the WAN mini-port adapters could not be deleted. I found a work-around that called for a manual driver update coupled with using a MS MAC Bridge driver for them. That allowed me to delete them, add them back in, and update the drivers.
4. I rebooted. All seemed to be working. The folder was correct, as were the registry entries. I opened Chrome. Boom, BSOD.
5. Aha. The dmp error information was exactly the same. Chrome seemed to be doing something. Therefore, I tried Firefox. Firefox opened sluggishly but ran and the machine didn’t die. I uninstalled and removed Google Chrome, a process that consumed almost an hour, a lot longer than it should.

And that’s the problem. Everything is taking longer than it should, pointing toward hardware failure. I’d run chipset tests but I suspect it’s another hard drive failure. I’ll see what I can do to pin that down and mitigate it and update everything before sending the HP back for repairs.

Progress is being made. It’s tedious, time-consuming and frustrating stuff. Fortunately, it takes little brain engagement, so I can do other things while I’m dealing with it, watch TV, pet the cats, eat, play games on the other computers, read, do Soduko puzzles.

Then I’m going to go back and try to fix the other computer – if I can find the boot up CD – and recover that password. At this point, it’s an itch that I can’t scratch, and I want to scratch.