Puter is broke

[sigstroker]

HP laptop, wish it wasn't HP but it is.
It was just playing a youtube and stopped and said something about some error, that said it needed to repair and reboot, and just started doing it. No prompts or anything. Black screen with HP logo and "Preparing Automatic Repair". After half an hour of nothing happening, I powered it down. It just tried by itself to reboot then went back to Preparing Automatic Repair and sits there. Is it a paperweight now? Is there anything I can do to get it fixed?

I have another laptop I bought a few Black Fridays ago, so I took it out of the box, and the flippin' thing has no ethernet port. I try to start it up and it wants to use wi-fi. I only use wi-fi for work because we couldn't get anything else to work. It gives me a list of networks to connect to, but I can't remember which one I used for work. I tried one at random and it wants a network security key. Where do I get that? The cable company?

[sigstroker]

Found the wifi security, now stuck in setup hell, stuck on a microsoft page I can't escape.

It says "sign in with your microsoft account. I don't have or want a microsoft account. Is there any way off this page?

[Reno-Kid]

Get a ethernet doggle... the other end is a C Type USB.
They come in various flavors including multi connectors.

4974028.webp

[Reno-Kid]

Found the wifi security, now stuck in setup hell, stuck on a microsoft page I can't escape.

It says "sign in with your microsoft account. I don't have or want a microsoft account. Is there any way off this page?

Yup! You gotta set up a Microsoft Account and tie it to your cell phone number and Email Account. No alternatives, it's required.

[Sputnik]

Linux is an alternative…

[ibanezfoo]

Found the wifi security, now stuck in setup hell, stuck on a microsoft page I can't escape.

It says "sign in with your microsoft account. I don't have or want a microsoft account. Is there any way off this page?

Underneath that it should say something about other sign on options or use a domain account or something to that affect. Click on that and you get two more options about creating an online account or setting it up for business use or use domain account. Click the business use one and set up a local account. The parts to actually click on are tiny because they really don't want you to be in control of your own accounts or computer. You might get some more nags about how super neeto the online accounts are and you should really use one. Just ignore that crap.

MS has really entered another level of straight up evil. Whenever you think how much worse can they get, they will impress you...

[ldsnet]

Ah, the TWO things I hate, Windows 11 And HP.... As to fixing it, the big question is what's broke? Mother Board (including cooling fans, processor or built in video card)? Ram or Drive Space? And how computer Savvy are you? Are you comfortable poking around in BIOS? Do you have the tools and knowledge to open it up and replace parts? Then the Windows side of the problem and what it will take to rebuild? Is there info on the drive that has to be recovered? I could be something as straightforward as the SSD failed.

[Big Chudungus]

Underneath that it should say something about other sign on options or use a domain account or something to that affect. Click on that and you get two more options about creating an online account or setting it up for business use or use domain account. Click the business use one and set up a local account.

MS has really entered another level of straight up evil. Whenever you think how much worse can they get, they will impress you...

Thx for the tip about no account setup. I think if I'd known that before maybe One Drive wouldn't have been deleting files without my permission. Fortunately, most of what got deleted was simple SolidWorks and I hear even the pros will tend to make same part from scratch lots of times.

IMO a big part of the problem is MS is making deals with outfits like SW to ONLY do a MS version. That sounds like Tortious Interference and probably some sort of crime on MS's part. I remember hearing a decade or so ago SW was bragging about how its now "built on Windows", instead of just "can run on Windows" and thinking "That doesn't sound good".

[Sputnik]

That’s pretty much how M$ got as big as they are…shady deals to get their OS on drives from factory.

[sigstroker]

Ah, the TWO things I hate, Windows 11 And HP.... As to fixing it, the big question is what's broke? Mother Board (including cooling fans, processor or built in video card)? Ram or Drive Space? And how computer Savvy are you? Are you comfortable poking around in BIOS? Do you have the tools and knowledge to open it up and replace parts? Then the Windows side of the problem and what it will take to rebuild? Is there info on the drive that has to be recovered? I could be something as straightforward as the SSD failed.

Hardware is fine, I'm pretty sure. Looks like something in Windoze got corrupted. I got to a spot where I could copy a default image over the Windoze, but i lose everything of mine. Then I got another error where it said the image that it's installing might be corrupted.

That's my old Windows 10 laptop.

The Windows 11 laptop is supposed to be the "replacement" laptop. It has problems too. It said it needed to install updates. I knew I couldn't delay it forever, so I let it go. When it restarted, the taskbar was gone. That's a huge pain in the arse. The clock is gone, it's hard to figure out which apps are open, and the area at the bottom of the screen is dead. I can't click on anything in that area. I tried the usual fixes, settings menu, etc. Nothing works. I've seen reports of having to reinstall Windoze 11. That's pretty suck. Any other ideas?

[ibanezfoo]

Thx for the tip about no account setup. I think if I'd known that before maybe One Drive wouldn't have been deleting files without my permission. Fortunately, most of what got deleted was simple SolidWorks and I hear even the pros will tend to make same part from scratch lots of times.

IMO a big part of the problem is MS is making deals with outfits like SW to ONLY do a MS version. That sounds like Tortious Interference and probably some sort of crime on MS's part. I remember hearing a decade or so ago SW was bragging about how its now "built on Windows", instead of just "can run on Windows" and thinking "That doesn't sound good".

Technically you can run Solidworks with Wine in Linux. How well it runs, I do not know.

[Preston-CLB]

Sig, here's a method I used to fix Win 10. It worked nicely, and I've had no issues since.

http://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/7808-dism-repair-windows-10-image.html

If a Windows image becomes unserviceable, you can use the Deployment Imaging and Servicing Management (DISM) tool to update the files and correct the problem.

For example, you would use DISM to fix Windows component store corruption when a sfc /scannow command is unable to repair corrupted or modified system files because the component store (source) is corrupted. SFC should be able to repair the files afterwards.

It appears there is a similar procedure for Win 11...

https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/windows-operating-systems/how-to-repair-a-windows-11-using-dism-command-tool

Both sites are reputable. I've used their guides for years. I hope this helps.
-P

[sigstroker]

Thanks, I'll take a look. It's completely FUBAR wrt running Windows. I'm not sure it will boot in any form at all. You can still do these repairs with with this tool?

[Preston-CLB]

Sig, the machine has to boot in order to run the DISM commands using PowerShell.
-P

[sigstroker]

It will sorta boot, but not into Windows. It can sometimes make it as far as something that tells me it's having an error, but that's it. I don't know if it's running in DOS or some weird pre-DOS environment.