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Hewlett Packard Laptop Help needed…
My boss’s son has brought a HP laptop from eBay it’s a ‘OMNIBOOK 4150’ and is a Pentium 2 364mhz with 128mb of ram… running windows XP! Surprisingly fast!
Now the problem is USB does not work, there is no mention of it in the ‘device manager’ put there are USB ports, I think they may well be turned off in the bios but the bios has a password and guess what! The seller does not know it!!
Any ideas chaps? :rant:
Clear the BIOS is your only option really. Try lifting the keyboard out to see if there are any jumpers under it. If not you might have to take the back off.
ok question time! will clearing the bios wipe out what is installed? am i at any risk of killing this laptop? do you know of any software that can beat the bios so to speak?
My money is on the laptop needed the ACPI bios.
Grab it from here .
Says it's for 2k but will also do nicely for XP. Flashing the BIOS may also nuke the password (2 jobs in one! :) )
One other thing... Check the version of XP thats on there. My money says you can't get SP1 to install.... ;)
hi Jiff i just done a little looking around myself and yeah i agree seems to be a bios prob, also from what i can see there is no bios option for turning the USB on or off, so that won't fix my problem. I have not tried installing SP1 as i don't know if the XP installed is lejit, coming from EBAY i doubt it!! also seems that this lappy is not really for windows XP but everything else works well... problem is i don't have a floppy drive so can i make a bootable CD? and if so how?
Got a windows 98 cd? Boot up from that. Download the Bios and copy it to cd.
^
not quite sure i'm with you? i wanna keep XP installed as this is not my lappy, infact i just wanan give the damn thing back and say "not my prob" but you know what it's like when the boss gives you something! :)
you boot up from a Windows 98 cd to get you into DOS (start windows 98 with CD support) - however, instead of typing "setup" to start the install, you swap the CD for you BIOS flash CD and then flash the BIOS.
ok i'm with you Jiff, thanks i will speak to my boss and let him work out what he wants to do!
That's the way indeed. Could solve the problem. Laptops tend to feel a little limited when troubleshooting :)