TESTING THE BROKEN PIECES

I finally got Windows 10 on the laptop!

In a few weeks time your going to find out some things and ask why in the world I bothered to do that and spend all that time doing it...

Well see what I did on my corruption blogs and everything I got against the biggest names in the land and you will realise I do not like being beaten?! Well in some instances. A few instances. Gaming for instance ... under some circumstances ... OH YOU BLOODY WELL GET MY POINT! LMAO!

It installed under Windows Update. After four failures via Microsoft's installation tool you can download which already worked and quickly on my main desktop computer. First time too.

I have not used the laptop in a long time. It sits around doing nothing. Partly because it gets too damned hot and I do not know why. Or at least I did not know why ... I think?

I will explain.

It threw up a dialogue box in Windows 7 about not having graphics drivers installed. I remembered it had been doing this previously. Now I am not sure how or why but I was surprised after I purchased this laptop from PC World, I got royally ripped off for, and discovered two graphics chips inside it.

A 4200 series and a 5000 series.

Before they placed graphics on the CPU die that is, so why I was confused.

Anyway the issue was that the graphics driver it was having issues with was the 5000 series and not the 4200 series.

Now I thought that the installation of Windows 10 might cure this. I had remembered that I had tried to correct the problem previously but gave up ... likely because the laptop kept overheating and shutting down. There is a genuine reason, well could be two, that it overheats. Due to bad design by HP combined with PC World's DON'TKNOWHOW team who claimed they fixed it and did not.

The screen hinge on the left had seized and when you forced the lid open it opened up the left hand side of the case, prising it apart in other words, right where the fan is and the exit port for air.

So what was happening is the channel for the air to blow out quickly was being opened up so the air was going all over the place and not being channelled out.

Now ask me if I would advise you to buy a laptop from PC World? Lol!

There was one other little thing too...

I tried Unity and Ubuntu on my laptop for a period.

The Linux was still crap...sorry any fanboys, cannot change that...crap is still crap. If it does what you want it to do then great ... I am all happy for yah. But it does not do many things I want it to do, did not like the graphics card and drivers ... yeah you can whine all you like but no one mentions this and nor did several magazines that said you can install it on anything without any issues....

Except maybe breaking your laptop?!

You see because one time I was out with the laptop showing others what Linux is and explaining it when the laptop shut down and gave a warning about heat.

It then did this several times, I was disappointed at how slow my version of Linux was, wondered what had gone wrong from the days of RedHat ... errr ... 4 I think? I decided after three or four shutdowns to take Ubuntu off the damn laptop.

I was remembering this after Windows 10 installed and I got the same damned message about no graphics drivers being installed when something suddenly occurred to me ...

Ubuntu fried my Radeon 5000 series graphics chip?!

I suddenly thought that the warning message was a lie, even if unintentional. It was telling me I had no graphics driver installed and did this no matter what version I installed. The 4200 series was fine but in device manager I always had the exclamation mark against the 5000 series no matter what I did.

Maybe ... Windows was not able to contact the graphics chip because it had been fried? Yes, I thought, that must be it!

Except that I was reinstalling the Catalyst drivers for the umpteenth time, except this time under Windows 10, and suddenly right before my eyes the exclamation mark for the 5000 series Radeon chip vanished. Just vanished ... just like that. The first effing time in over a year!

"HUH?!?!"

That was my thought as I reached the conclusion about the fried chip when the bloody thing disappeared!!

WTF!

Anyway it was late ... I powered down the laptop and started to wonder what the odds were that when I booted up the laptop again that, that little exclamation mark and message about no graphics driver being installed would return?

So no, I cannot go ranting on that, that little session with Linux via Ubuntu I had actually did physical damage to my laptop. I just can't, lol.

However ... if ... IF .. things go awry again then I can say that in 35 years of computing I had my very first instance of software destroying hardware.

I will find out next time I boot up the laptop and I am hoping that the darn thing goes back to how it was without the extreme heat and roaring fan.

Kirk Out!