Did you have the laptop stuck in a cupboard unused for a long while? If so the battery will have gone into "deep discharge" which knackers them. So you might get it to work just about but the battery life would be a matter of minutes and it can just go off with no warning.
If the main battery goes flat then that can also lead to the small back up battery also suffering from deep discharge and it becomes useless to hold basic info like time and settings.
I have an old camera which I neglected to charge up every few months so, although I can use it with fresh main batteries inserted, the back up battery is "gone" so I have to reset the time and date etc whenever I take out a main battery to change it for a freshly charged one.
Reminds me it's time I recharged all the other things I still hang onto but rarely use, old tablet and a few cameras.
Destroying the hard drive - I tried that on a one from an old tower PC. Six inch nail would not go thought it. Could not drill through it. Ended up just hammering the connectors to make them unusable. Theoretically someone could have maybe still got at the data on it out but there was nothing on there which would have been worth the bother.
Yes indeed, the laptop has lain unused for years. When we retrieved it from its forced slumber, it would no longer switch on. So we stored it away again "just in case" it remembered us at a later date and we bought a new one. That was two years ago.
Today, I thought I would try to switch it on and Eureka!! It did but produced several messages, the most worrying of which was a red cross across the battery icon.
Then it said my version of Microsoft was a pirate!? and my mouse did not work...
The wire seems OK but since it was purchased around 13 years ago, it could well have given up the ghost.
I scoured the internet, mostly the HP website which offered solutions but quite frankly, I couldn't be bothered...
Thank you for your information🤗
