The HP Lappy Lives – but for how long?

I’ve got a HP NC6000 Laptop that I used heavily for several years.  After we moved it started to hang occasionally.  About a month ago it was hung, and nothing would bring it back, so I put it on book shelf.

It’s been running ubuntu for the past couple of years, and I’d like to try the windows 7 install on it – but I fear the hardware is very underpowered.

This morning I finally have some room on the desk, so I plugged it in and it started up perfectly.  Ran the updates and am now looking into the hanging problem.  Found this useful link, and am now running the memtest utility for a while.

To be honest, one reason I want this thing working is because of the kewl stickers on the case.

Ran memTest for 1.5hrs.  Completed 2 passes.  All green.  Gonna bring this laptop back into the fold.

Booted fine 3 times in a row.

Following Day: It won’t boot.  Get’s to BIOS select drive screen – let it auto choose as I did yesterday – and now it locks at the “Starting up …” screen.

Useful info here

Steps to get a little futher:

1. Boot and hit ESC at Grub Loading screen
2. Select first boot option, hit E to edit
3. remove the nosplash and add “acpi=off” (previous version need no acpi I think)
4. hit esc, hit B to boot

Now I have to figure out how to make it work every time.

Found answer to edit grub here

Not sure if it’s related – but the touchpad mouse is sketch now.

Rebooted without USB mouse dongle and things seem okay.  Not getting the power icon on the task bar – but I can probably live without it.