Repair of PC Advent Roma 1000

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Well i have to start this article with a biased view that i am not a particular fan of PC Advent series laptops. This fix or repair was for a friend, who had made the mistake of purchasing the PC Advent Roma 1000 as a reconditioned laptop from a store.

Due to family circumstances he had been unable to use the laptop for the first year. After his life returning to normal he thought he would give the laptop to his daughter to use. To their horror the laptop would only stay on for about 20 minutes at a time.

My initial thought was to see if there was any driver conflicts or maybe if flash player or something like that was causing the problem, so rigged it up on the work bench and alas no sound at all from the laptop, no sound at all, no fans nothing.

Overheating seemed a credible cause, so entered the bios screen and let it sit, again laptop shutdown after about 20 minutes, so heat was the factor.

Taking into consideration the age of the laptop possibly 15 – 24 months old i did not think that any major repair was cost effective but maybe a quick cheap fix was called for.

A quick phone call to my friend “can i borrow your laptop cooling tray?” Testing could begin.

First test was could it play a dvd all the way through, this is a good test as it uses a large amount of graphics and should push the CPU harder than normal and voila 3 hours without shutting down, problem solved!

Then after a small celebration i looked at the CPU spec it was running a celeron processor (celeron processors are budget processors) and with it running Windows 7, a quick phone call “do you want to try this with Windows XP?” and a quick reply “go for it!” So loaded the Roma 1000 with XP home to see if i could find the drivers. That went easily some basic drivers were being used.

How did it run with Windows XP? It ran extremely quickly and after installing Google chrome was able to quickly open a webpage. Decedid then to install Avast Anti-Virus as this is at the moment a lightweight Anti-Virus which does not eat into the speed of the laptop to much at all.

A Notebook Cooling Pad is a great idea to help make your laptop last just that little bit longer. Simply clip on the fans to the tray aligned with your vents underneath the laptop and plug in the USB. Heat is a major cause of laptops going wrong.

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