"My laptop won't turn on. Can you fix it?"

A friend with a HP Compaq CQ61 laptop had an issue with the laptop not turning on. They had given me a clue by saying that the charger did not seem to be working. However they had tried another charger from one of their friends that was supposedly the same model and it still didn't work.

So I plug the laptop charger in to the mains and then plug the charger into the laptop. Sure enough there was no life in the laptop. The battery had also run down so no blinking flashing leds, screens or anything.

Crack out the trusty meter and check to see if there was any volts coming out of the charger and going into the laptop. Nope there wasn't.

Do we have mains going into the charger? Change the meter to AC and measure the voltage. None again. Perhaps the fuse has gone. Unplug from the mains to check and..... well see for yourself

Total lack of the live pin on the plug. Well this will be easy, just change the plug.

Plug changed, does it work? No. Damn!

Zoostorm Freedom 10-270 - Hard Drive Removal and CMOS battery replacement

The Zoostorm Freedom 10-270 is a small netbook PC. A friend asked me to have a look at the 10-270 as the machine would not boot. After doing all the usual checks I decided that I needed to scan the hard drive to see if it was infected. I tried the Microsoft Standalone System Sweeper, loaded on to a USB stick, but it could not find the Windows partition so failed to load. I then decided that the best way forward was to remove the hard drive from the netbook and attach it to my desktop machine where I would be able to scan it easier.

I turned the netbook over to try and find the cover that was hiding the hard drive. None of the covers underneath  had a hard drive beneath them, oh dear! A quick Google led me to this page. So now I knew, to get to the hard drive you have to dismantle the netbook almost completely, oh deary dear!

So are you feeling brave? Then let us begin.
If your netbook is still in warranty then send it back and let them deal with it. If it's out of warranty and you have nothing to lose, have a go, it's the only way to learn you know!