baeuchlein on 28/6/2008 at 11:31
Quote Posted by Infernalis
yes, with the AC adapter in and the batterie out it will do it's flash on thing.
I'm not certain whether this means "it's working like it should" or rather "no, it still just flashes shortly and then the lights go out again".
If the notebook powers up and boots normally when you use it with the battery out, then there's a problem with either the battery itself or the charging mechanism inside the notebook. We have such a problem with a laptop we frequently use. Since we don't use it without a power source nearby, we just took the battery out and use the laptop without it. Considering that this laptop is about ten years old, we have serious doubts that we could still acquire replacement parts for it, so we never even tried.
If you wish to insert the battery pack, but not use it, you could try to insulate the pack's contacts by putting some tape over them. I did this with a laptop which otherwise would have some internal parts exposed to the outside, and I didn't want to allow people to fiddle about with these parts.
In some cases the battery packs of notebooks and cordless phones contain standard rechargeable batteries. In such a case, one could open the battery pack's case, find out whether there are dead cells in there and then replace them. I did this a few times with a phone and another ancient laptop. Sometimes, it worked well for a few years, sometimes only for months.
You can guess whether your battery pack might contain standard rechargeable batteries if you measure the voltage which the charged pack contains. This can usually be done without opening the pack. Then, you calculate how many cells the pack should contain if it was made of standard cells. After that, see whether the battery pack's size has enough space to hold the number of standard cells you calculated. If it's size is about right (or just slightly more than what you expected), then chances are good that it indeed contains the appropriate number of standard cells. And
then you can open the pack and check it out.
If, however, the notebook still does not change its behaviour once the battery pack is disconnected, then it looks like something important is broken. You can then consider to open it and take out the hard disk. With an appropriate adapter, small (2,5") IDE hard disks commonly found in notebooks can be used with desktop PC's. You can then rescue data from that disk (if you want to), and/or use it for whatever you want to do with an additional hard drive.
It is possible that the CPU could be re-used in a desktop computer, but you have to carefully check whether there's a motherboard available which works with this particular CPU. And whether the CPU is OK or gone to hardware heaven, you have to find out as well.
RAM found in notebooks often does not fit into desktop PCs, but if you find RAM which looks like it fits into a desktop PC you own, you could give it a try. If you want to do this, try to find out what kind of RAM the notebook conatined (check the Compaq/HP internet pages for this particular notebook) and verify it's the right type for your desktop PC. After that, you can insert the RAM stick and see whether the PC recognizes it or not.
Most other parts in notebooks are not re-usable in other computers, since they're specially constructed to fit into the notebook they were made for.
