Laptop Issues | Imamother

amother

Fri, Apr 23 2021, 3:24 am

I have an ASUS laptop that's like 4 years old and we already had to replace the hard drive like 2 years ago. For the past couple of weeks it has been charging only to 83% and constantly has the "charging" light blinking. Now for a couple of days on-and-off, the column with 2, w, s, x only works when it feels like it. When it doesn't, I can only write those letters by copying-pasting or with the on-screen keyboard. Anyone know if these 2 issues are related or if I could fix it easily or if it's worth fixing? Or if it's going to die any day now?

amother

Jade

Fri, Apr 23 2021, 12:11 pm

Sounds like 2 separate issues, the battery might be going and the keyboard is also breaking. If the laptop is 4 years old it might not be worth fixing, technology changes very quickly and it might be cheaper to get a new laptop.

Last edited by amother on Wed, Dec 15 2021, 9:15 pm; edited 1 time in total

amother

Jade

Mon, Apr 26 2021, 3:20 pm

I'm sorry! Hope you found a new one! If you need to get the files off the computer a good computer tech should be able to. Seems like the battery is broken but the hard drive might still be intact.
You can even do this yourself by buying a hard drive case that can be plugged into a new laptop (you'd have to take apart your old laptop to get the hard drive and put it in the case, shouldn't be too difficult) and use it to find your old files.

amother

Tue, Apr 27 2021, 2:09 am

Thank you so much for the advice! What I should have done is backed up all the stuff I was working on when I suspected an issue... but I wasn't that bright. But you're right, the hard drive was fine, so I bought a new computer and external hard drive and paid someone not so much to transfer everything from that hard drive onto the external. I have a contraption to do that myself, but it didn't work, so the tech guy said maybe it's too old and the hard drive is too new so they're not compatible. Don't know. Baruch Hashem the extra work I needed to do was pretty minimal and almost everything is working fine on this new computer.

If anyone knows how to get a gmail account onto Mailbird without the ability to get an SMS on my phone to verify my identity, I'd love to hear. For 2 of my gmail accounts they gave me the option of a voice message, so they worked. But for 2 of the accounts they're only giving the option of SMS, which my Israeli kosher phone doesn't have at all. So I'm stuck.

cbsp

Tue, Apr 27 2021, 9:35 am

amother [ OP ] wrote:

Can you create a Google voice phone number and get SMS messages sent to one of the verified Gmail accounts?

amother

Tue, Apr 27 2021, 11:48 am

Thanks everyone for the ideas. I have a virtual US number, but that also didn't work for some reason. It looks like they don't want people using those numbers to get around these security issues. Which makes sense... in the end I just forwarded one of the emails to another and changed a couple of mailing list emails from the other. So I'm all set I think. Thanks again!

amother

Tue, Apr 27 2021, 11:57 am

Oh and I really wonder if it was just the battery on the old one. Maybe one day if I get my hands on another battery that fits, I'll try it out. We gave it to a computer fixer to look at briefly, and he said it's broken but we didn't want to pay him to check into it more, so he didn't. Does that really happen though that an old (4 years?) battery would charge only 83% for a couple of weeks and then suddenly not accept any charge at all? And then the computer wouldn't turn on at all or light up at all even when plugged in? It just went black...

cbsp

Tue, Apr 27 2021, 11:59 am

amother [ OP ] wrote:

Maybe it was the plug (transformer) or the power port itself.

But yes, batteries can fail as well

amother

Tue, Apr 27 2021, 2:24 pm

No, I tried various plugs and connectors, so that wasn't it. It could be it was the battery. The question is then why it didn't work plugged in (which it was). If a computer doesn't have a battery in at all, doesn't it still work when plugged in?