Near Intersection of I-35 & I-90 Southern Mn. | Some time ago, I bought a very low end HP laptop from Wal-Mart. My goal was to plug in an external Hard Drive with my vast collection of music for use in the shop. I had an older computer prior to this that started having various problems.
The laptop is really bare bones in that it does not have a CD drive nor an internal hard drive. It has an HDMI port and two USB ports. It also has a headphone jack that I use to feed the music to an old sound system. Apparently the operating system is stored on internal memory.
It worked fine for my purposes (music only) for a while.
I haven't used it for a while due to harvest but the other day I tried using it and the opening screen indicated that it needed to go into a repair mode. The screen indicated that a windows file was missing or corrupted. The file was listed by name. There were a few suggestions listed one of which was to go to an HP website. I tried this but wasn't successful.
My thinking is that I need to boot up the system via some type of operating system that would be stored on a USB device. Perhaps I was instructed to make some type of recovery USB stick when the system was operating but I do not recall instructions of that type. Anyway I do not have one.
The computer is listed as an HP Slipstream and was operating under Win 8.1. I did a google search and found a supposed "free" site to help with the problem. As usual it was overseas with a lot of background noise from others at the call center. The lady agreed to fix my computer for $200. I said that this was about the price I paid for it. She said that I would lose my data otherwise. Normally this would be an issue but not in my case since I'm using it for music playback only. She asked how much I would pay. I replied $25, she said that was not enough.
Any ideas on a plan of action? I probably just end up discarding it and moving on but I would be willing to try a bit more. Thanks. |
Problems with low end laptop
