HP 6710b - Unusual Power Supply Glitch

[Batman]

Some time last year a staff member had a problem with his HP 6710b laptop. It just crawled to a standstill, and I spent hours trying to work out what was slowing it down. I reimaged it, ran it off a live cd, swapped out just about every piece of hardware from it and still it wouldn't do anything at a usable speed. After much tedium it was replaced with a brand new machine and I disassembled it and used it for spares, including the power supply which I had labelled some weeks earlier "Paddy McGinty's Goat" (as the staff member is Irish and it seemed rude not to have a joke about it).

 

On Friday a member of staff brought a 6710b to me which had apparently died. I pulled a power supply from the spares draw and it started straight away... didn't even log in, I knew I'd fixed it so powered it off and gave it back. I got a call two hours later to say that it wasn't letting her on the Internet. When I came to look at it I realised that the whole thing was running like a sloth. Completely baffled, I brought it back to the office and was about mid way through investigating when I noticed a label on the psu.

 

"Paddy McGinty's Goat".

 

I pulled out the power, the laptop switched to batteries and... suddenly it all came back to life. We're all a bit surprised that a psu could have that effect, but most of all it's amusing that the one clue that led me to the solution was my stupid prank from when we first gave our Irish friend his laptop!

 

I am a little bummed that we scrapped a perfectly good machine because of the power supply though

[mkanz]

Funny that! I had the same problem after purchasing a Power Supply from a so called registered supplier of HP products in Hong Kong. Not only did the power supply get extremely hot that it nearly set my carpet on fire but my computer would often grind to halt for no apparent reason until I unplugged the power supply and voila..everything back to normal. Where did you purchase your power supply from?

[SYNACK]

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/hardware/61702-solved-weird-slowdown-hp-laptops-due-dammaged-smartpin-adapter.html

 

Yea, its a weird one thanks to the smartpin malfunctioning and chucking huge amounts of interupts at the CPU killing the performance. Ours were hp genuine but the cables were trashed by teachers rolling chairs/desks/etc. over them.

Edited March 22, 2012 by SYNACK

[Danp]

We had problems with some of our 6735s, one power supply would cause a laptop to get stuck at bios with the fan on full speed, pull the mains and it boots fine on battery