Recently, I had a spout of 'slowness' and battery problems with my HP-Compaq 6510B, which I rammed up to 4GB RAM and was running on W2K8 x64 Enterprise w/Hyper V. It was running fine for the first 6 months, until I noticed that my battery failes to retain charge and it took me an exceptionally long time to boot up (e.g. 20-40 mins to show login screen). Here's the series of 'repair' before I can safely declare that I have my heavy-but-better-performing laptop back in good condition:
- 1-1 exchange of RAM (since I upgrade myself). I suspect it could be due to ram problem as the laptop took a long time to pass the RAM test and on initial test of swapping the original 2GB RAM module back, my laptop was ok. But not for long.
- Discovered battery problem + slowness. HP helpdesk diagnose it could be due to (a) notebook heat dissipation problem or (b) faulty motherboard. In order to assist the HP engineers to load their diagnostic tools, I formatted my laptop and brought it back to life in Vista x86. HP took the initiative of swapping (b) for me and I reinstalled W2K8. It was ok, but again, not for long.
- This time, HP engineer suggested that it could be a hdd problem. Fine - I did a harddisk sanitisation and did a 1-1 exchange for a new hard-disk with the same capacity and speed. Reinstalled W2K8 again. As suspected, the problem still persists.
- Finally, my last service call to HP. They suspected that my CPU is faulty and wanted to do a CPU swap for me. On the day of repair, the HP engineer discovered that it could be due to a component in the power supply which caused the machine to 'crawl'... So, I changed a new adapter and I think it saved my day (and my laptop)
For those who're using a HP-Compaq 6510b, if you face the same problem, it could be due to your power supply (and not your Vista / Win2K8).. 