It’s pretty straightforward to troubleshoot. Just plug your phone into your PC using a USB cable. If the laptop actually recognizes the device and your phone pops up a prompt asking you to allow data transfer, then you know the hardware and the cable are working fine. At that point, it’s just a matter of digging through the settings on your tablet to find what you need.
I’ve always kept my settings set to both US and UK standards on every Windows machine I’ve ever owned. Honestly, if the second layout isn't there, it’s not even a big deal—you can just jump into the settings and add or fix a third option if the keyboard is stuck on some weird default setting.
It’s definitely there for me—my screen shows "HRV," and when I click it, I get the choice between a US standard keyboard or an "ENG" (US) US keyboard before I type in my login password.
...wait, could the keyboard layout or language settings have switched up? You know, the one in the bottom right corner of the login screen? If that happened, you might be typing away and getting nothing but gibberish.
Just separate the films and wipe down the contacts... then let the top plate with the keys just sit there and dry for a day or two (unless you want to pop the keys off to speed up the drying process before putting them back where they belong). Watch out when you put back that conductive rubber strip sitting between the film contact and the electronic board. That little strip works by alternating between conductive and non-conductive sections—there's like fifty of those tiny layers packed into those few centimeters—so try not to get any grease from your fingers on it.
Most power supplies you see nowadays use both grease and electrolytic capacitors at the input, which causes that huge initial surge of current while the capacitor is charging up. If you've got a bunch of gear plugged into the same power strip, all those startup spikes hit at once, and that’s enough to trip your circuit breaker.
Yeah, I had to jump back in there because it looked like the guy needed some extra hand-holding after post #3. He seemed a bit lost on whether he should be "tinkering" or just "smashing things together," so I figured I'd clarify: seriously, just grab a Samsung SSD instead of an old-school Seagate if you're running Windows 10. It's a night and day difference.
...seriously, stop tapping on that Seagate. You're just asking for more bad sectors to pop up.
Look, there are definitely ways to grab the files you actually care about. First things first: you've gotta pull that drive out of the machine. Once it's out, grab a USB adapter for a 2.5" drive—either borrow one or just pick one up online—and plug it into any working computer. That way, you can just drag and drop whatever you need. Like I said before, the best move is to take that pulled drive and plug it directly into a desktop PC—maybe a buddy's rig, your son's computer, or even a workstation at the office. From there, you can dump everything onto their internal drive if they've got the space, or just move it over to some thumb drives. Later on, once you've got your laptop sorted out with a Samsung SSD and a fresh OS install, you can just move all those saved files right back onto your machine.
Don't even bother turning that laptop on. Just pull the Hard Drive out, plug it into a desktop, and try to rescue whatever files aren't corrupted. It looks like that drive is riddled with bad sectors, and honestly, every time you power it up, those bad spots just spread further. The good news is this machine supports SSDs. You could even swap out the old CD/DVD drive for a second storage bay if you wanted to toss in a new HDD alongside the SSD. Once you switch to an SSD, the laptop is going to feel snappy again. That sluggishness you're seeing with Windows 10? Most likely just the old Hard Drive struggling to keep up. The max RAM capacity is 8GB, so if you're sitting at 4GB right now, adding another 4GB would be a smart move. Also, keep in mind that overheating can really tank your performance too. It might be worth taking it to a repair shop to have them swap the drives and give the fans and heatsink a good cleaning while they're at it...
Nah, they aren't even related, and there's no way it’s going to delete anything from Google Drive either. It basically just sits there in standby mode until you actually wake it up.
I got a totally identical email like that years ago. I’ve never even touched Google Drive—it was just some random cloud service or sync tool I used to dump my files online once in a while—so I just wiped everything related to Google Drive off my Windows 10 machine.
Honestly, I feel you. I’ve only got 120GB myself, but I don't really touch gaming. Instead, I’ve set almost everything—my Downloads, Pictures, Documents, all that stuff—to live on my HDD rather than the SSD. Still, if I were you, I'd definitely look into grabbing something like this. It gives the SSD some breathing room so it doesn't have to work as hard, which helps it last way longer. https://www.amazon.com/kingston-ssd-sata-155290031
If I remember correctly, that Dell Inspiron has an empty 2280 M.2 slot meant for an M.2 SATA SSD, but they don't mention anything about supporting an M.2 NVMe SSD...
...I missed the OS 😢 That could definitely be an issue since the motherboard needs to actually support an SSD and have the right drivers for XP ... I tried swapping an HDD for an SSD once on a board that didn't really support it, and man, it ran at half speed. Plus, because there was no "trim" support, I had to manually turn off defragging just so I wouldn't wreck the drive.
If there’s no post, the logo might show up, but he says there’s absolutely nothing on the screen and the monitor won't even kick on. The fact that there’s zero light coming from the mouse or the keyboard makes me think we're looking at a voltage issue somewhere in the power supply. Ideally, I'd want to see which fan is spinning, because if it's the CPU fan, these symptoms make total sense. If only I knew what kind of ASUS Motherboard, CPU, GPU (is it onboard?), and RAM setup we're dealing with—like, is it one stick or multiple? Honestly, it feels like this guy hasn't really messed around with hardware before, so his best bet is to hand it off to a pro. A technician could run through all these guesses in just a few minutes.
It’s not the GPU or the drives. If the thing is actually running and you can hear it humming, it’s likely just the fans. If there’s no beep code and your keyboard and mouse aren't lighting up, you're probably looking at a dead power supply or a fried motherboard. If a peripheral was causing the issue—like a short circuit—it would have tripped the PSU and shut everything down instantly. You really need to check the power connectors on the ASUS Motherboard to make sure nothing is loose or looks burnt. If you aren't sure how to troubleshoot that, it's probably better to take the rig to someone who knows their way around a PC (or just grab them a beer 🙂 and ask them to take a quick look).
Come on, take it easy... Not everyone is being difficult. Like I said in my first reply, I need to know if she’s actually cleaned the system lately (she didn't say), if Windows 10 prompts her to run a disk check during startup to verify the HDD health (didn't answer that either), and what kind of laptop we're even dealing with so we can figure out the hardware specs (still waiting on that one).
To stop the laptop from totally choking, I'd suggest an SSD as the most important upgrade. I’m running a 120GB one myself, which is definitely cheaper than $67 brand new ones. Right now, on my machine, just having Firefox open with a single tab (like Reddit) eats up about 2.2GB of RAM. -Windows 10 treats CleanMyMac like malware sometimes and just wipes it out. -I make sure to run a disk defrag on Windows 10 every week if she hasn't touched it.
If I don't get answers to the questions we asked, I'm done commenting..