[Solved] Weird slowdown of hp laptops - due to dammaged smartpin adapter

[SYNACK]

Thought I would post this as a heads up to anyone with hp laptops that use the 'smartpin' power adapters. These are the latest universal adapters from hp with a small pin in the middle of the adapter plug, these are really good in the fact that any smartpin adapter 60w, 80w or 120w will work on any smartpin laptop, unfourtunatly this can cause an issue when damaged.

When the plug or adapter is damaged the signals from adapter are mangled and the laptops power system can behave strangly, in this case beleiving that it did not have enough power when plugged in and stepping the processor and chipset down to its absoulte minimum levels. This means that when you plug the adapter in the CPU hits 100% and the machine chugs along like a C64 running Windows ME.

This can be tricky to diagnose, I know as it took several weeks of revisiting the problem to finally pin it down. As the cable can be only partially dammaged it can work most of the time but only go into this state when it is positioned in a certain way. The issue can be further confused when you swap out the laptop and the problem still occours (as the adapter was not swapped out). As such it ends up looking like a really well hidden virus that follows a particular user around and can't be detected. It was only when the cable failed while I was testing it for the manyith time that the fault finally became apparent.

So, if anyone else runs across random slowdowns on hp smartpin laptops in future check the power supply and it may just save you several weeks of strife.