The Windows 7 PC

So in my last blog I talked about some old computers I found that my dad owned and how I checked to see if they work so I could explore them and archive any important data I found along the way and one of these computers was a PC running Windows 7 and it gave me a lot of issues initially however after spending some more time with it, I have made a few discoveries. 

Yesterday I started inspecting the hardware to see if a hardware issue was the source of my problems like Error Recovery suggested. I put in an old GPU I had since there were signs a GPU got taken out but immediately after putting it in, it was clear that it wasn't that since the computer hated having the GPU in it and just totally rejected it. I then thought it could be the RAM so I replaced the two RAM sticks that it had and also downgraded from 4GB to 3GB in the process but that wasn't it either. I then took out the CPU cooler and gave it a nice dusting since it had some dust buildup in it and I made some real progress with this.

After dusting the CPU cooler, I managed to get into Startup Repair which was a huge feat since I was never able to get to that screen before and it said it would restart my computer however it just turned off but after manually turning it back on again, I managed to boot into the OS and also discovered that the computer was being used incredibly recently with modification dates from 2023. 

However this victory was short lived as after I tried to get audio, the PC shut off and had trouble booting up again but I thought it was just a cooling issue given how removing the dust buildup seemed to solve my problems so I left the PC alone for a little bit to cool off and managed to boot back into the OS. I then turned off the PC properly this time and let Windows 7 actually shut down so I could try to fix it some more the next day.

Today I was out running some errands and I got some thermal paste to fix the cooling situation and after getting back home and replacing the thermal paste, I was back at square one and ran into the same issues and I couldn't get it to boot up at all. It was at this point I began to suspect that my worst fear was coming true and that the hardware issue causing all of this was a bad HDD. I then took out the HDD and hooked it up to my main PC with a dock and my fears were basically confirmed as CrystalDiskInfo said the health of the HDD was unknown which is already scary but Windows 11 kept saying there was a problem with the drive and to repair it but it was unable to repair the drive and while Windows 11 did recognize the drive, it would stop reading it immediately after so I didn't have time to get any files off of it. While I couldn't get 100% confirmation and an accurate health scan from CrystalDiskInfo, I think with everything I've experienced that it's safe to assume the health is very bad. I might try to see if I can recover anything since it is still just barely holding on and is only super volatile but since it's not really in a usable state, I'm gonna pronounce this PC as dead.

R.I.P. HP Compaq Presario CQ5000 (2009-2025)