With Covid 19 lock down a friend pulled a couple of HP Compaq CQ43 laptops (circa 2011) out of the cupboard and asked if I could get them going….

Hadn’t been used for years… "maybe had a virus"… no power adapters 😑

The big surprise to me was that after a factory restore to Win7 and checking for valid activation, I was then able to upgrade to Win10 which also showed valid activation.

So it appears that Microsoft is still supporting upgrades to Win10.

I had to use Windows Media Creation Tool in place on the laptops as I couldn’t get a USB memory stick upgrade to boot properly.

Other work I had to do:

Find a 7.4x5.0mm power adapter plug to feed the laptops with 19V. Now waiting for some 3 wire plug cables to make adapters for using existing 2 wire 19V power supplies I have lying around.

Blow a large cloud of dust out of the fan and grills.

Give the keyboard (seem to have metallic contacts) a big blast of compressed air to remove dust and stop unwanted key inputs.

Replaced one HDD by cloning. Windows error scan said the HDD was ok but the laptop diags failed the HDD.

Updated the BIOS.

Made backup images of both laptops using Macrium Reflect.

The end result was fully functional and stable laptops…. but a bit slow.

Not an economic couple of days but doable!!