I have an HP Pavillion DV7 laptop that's been having some trouble lately. It's 7 years old, and until about 2 and a half years ago it got used almost every day, so it's been used quite a bit. It's held up well, but it has been slowing down a bit over the past few years. Lately, though, it's started showing a black screen in place of the desktop when I start it up. It'll boot up to the point where it should display the desktop, but instead it'll just show the mouse pointer on an empty black screen. No UI will be visible, and if I right click or hit the Windows key to open the start menu, nothing will happen. Sometimes the desktop will appear after a couple/few minutes, and everything will be fine. Other times, I'll run out of patience after 5-10 minutes of black screen, and I'll ctrl+alt+delete (which does work) and shut it down from there. One time, after waiting like 10 minutes for the black screen to go away, I hit ctrl+alt+delete I told it to restart, hoping that might fix the issue. It sat there saying "restarting" for like half an hour or more, and then once it restarted, I think the desktop came up right away and all was well until I turned it off and then went to turn it back on again next time.
Three guesses I've had as to the cause of the issue, all of which could be totally wrong, are:
1.) It's the OS. It started out with Win 7, but I installed Windows 10 on it a couple years ago, and I've never completely warmed up to it. Given Windows 10's history of ****ed up updates and the like, it would not surprise me at all if this was down to a bug with the OS.
2.) It's a dying piece of hardware. I didn't know if maybe a dying HDD, or another part in there, might be the cause.
3.) The battery? Maaaaybe? The battery doesn't hold a charge well anymore, to the point that if you want to use it for more than a few minutes and the power level's below 100%, you'd better plug it in. I plug it in almost every time I use it now, but the black screen still happens when it's plugged in. I didn't know if the battery might still have something to do with it. I'm grasping at straws here.
Anyone got any ideas? I'd love it if someone had a better idea of what was wrong. I really don't know what the problem is. I'm sure someone's going to tell me to reinstall the OS, tbh that wouldn't be my first choice. I don't use the laptop very much anymore, so there's only so much I'll be willing to do to fix it. I mean, I'd probably replace the HDD if I knew that was the problem, but I'd rather not spend the time to reinstall the OS only to have it still be ****ed up when I next went to use it.
Three guesses I've had as to the cause of the issue, all of which could be totally wrong, are:
1.) It's the OS. It started out with Win 7, but I installed Windows 10 on it a couple years ago, and I've never completely warmed up to it. Given Windows 10's history of ****ed up updates and the like, it would not surprise me at all if this was down to a bug with the OS.
2.) It's a dying piece of hardware. I didn't know if maybe a dying HDD, or another part in there, might be the cause.
3.) The battery? Maaaaybe? The battery doesn't hold a charge well anymore, to the point that if you want to use it for more than a few minutes and the power level's below 100%, you'd better plug it in. I plug it in almost every time I use it now, but the black screen still happens when it's plugged in. I didn't know if the battery might still have something to do with it. I'm grasping at straws here.
Anyone got any ideas? I'd love it if someone had a better idea of what was wrong. I really don't know what the problem is. I'm sure someone's going to tell me to reinstall the OS, tbh that wouldn't be my first choice. I don't use the laptop very much anymore, so there's only so much I'll be willing to do to fix it. I mean, I'd probably replace the HDD if I knew that was the problem, but I'd rather not spend the time to reinstall the OS only to have it still be ****ed up when I next went to use it.
