Laptop Failure: 2009-11-20
I pulled this 2003 vintage laptop out. It’s a Compaq Presario 3000. Haven’t used it in a couple years now.
Well, in that time, the CMOS battery has gone dead, so that anytime I turn this thing on, I must manually configure the BIOS, which is a great pain.
But in order to apply to this machine the latest Windows XP updates, and since I have no replacement battery at this time, I configured the BIOS and set the date and time by hand on it. Then, the computer booted into Windows XP without further incident. I noticed before this that the hard drive size value displayed as 0 in the BIOS. Unusual since this machine utilizes a 60 GB HDD. This meant nothing at the time.
Anyway, once Windows came up, I attempted to run Windows Update, and got a message stating that the files the update process requires are either no longer registered or no longer installed on this box. So, thinking that this might be an Explorer problem, I successfully installed the latest Java updates. But this message persisted, asking if I wished to register and obtain the needed files. So I pressed Yes.
Drawing of the next web page in Internet Explorer 7 (yes, this box is really behind in the updates), happened slowly and in many fits and starts. But finally, after nearly a minute, I received the following error message:
Server Error
403 - Forbidden: Access is denied.
You do not have permission to view this directory or page using the credentials that you supplied.
I did the same thing a few more times and got the same results.
But then I rebooted, and looked at the CMOS settings again. This time, the HDD showed up correctly as a 60 GB hard drive. So I exited and booted the rest of the way into Windows, and tried Windows update again. This time, it’s working.
I’m glad because if I had replaced the dead CMOS battery and this problem persisted, I would have had to reinstall Windows as a next step.
I’d still like to replace the battery and plan to do so. Thus, I’ll enumerate the steps taken below, in the comments, to do that. So do stand by.
November 24th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
02:30 PM: I’ll track the replacement of these batteries in another project, described here. So I’m closing this one now, as this computer was updated successfully and completely, the other night.