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Question

HP Elitebook 8730w power problems worth fixing?

by Mar 2, 2015 1:09AM PST

I was recently left with a non-functional HP Elitebook 8730w 17 inch laptop. This is an older model as it came with Vista on it but has some nice specs for an older unit. It is a 2.53GHZ Core 2 Duo and all with discrete NVIDIA graphics. I originally thought this might be related to the NVIDIA curse but don't think it is.

Diagnostic has revealed it is likely a power problem on the motherboard. I have worked on some in the past like this. It wont' charge the battery and the power lights at the lower left of the laptop just flash continuously. I found many references to this problem but no solutions besides replacing the board. I tried a different power cord and that didn't help.

I found the entire lower half of one of these laptops with ATI graphics for about $75. It is everything including the CPU but I would need to transfer the HDD, RAM, battery, and such to the new unit as well as the screen of course. This doesn't seem like a bad price but wanted to get opinions here if this model is flawed or not. I don't want to fix it and then have it die again.

Discussion is locked

4 Posts
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Answer
I'm going with no.
by Forum moderator Mar 2, 2015 1:12AM PST

It's a 2009 model so at 6 years it's an old laptop that is best not doing any investment on. You may get some coin by ebaying it as-is.
Bob

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I am kinda on the fence.
by cwatkin Mar 2, 2015 1:33AM PST

One part of me says it is a 6+ year old laptop and isn't worth fixing. The other part of me says it was very nice for its time and still knocks the socks off any of the cheapos being sold today in terms of specs and build quality.

If I wasn't fat on decent used laptops I have repaired to resell as well as several I use for my own personal use, I would jump on the opportunity to fix this for $75.

I may sit on this a bit and not make any big decisions or just try to move it on eBay. One of the issues I have with eBay is that people often don't pay enough for laptop bezels/housings to make selling them there worthwhile. I may try once and then recycling it if not. I will pull the CPU, RAM, and HDD as those might come in handy down the line. I still get quite a few systems from this era in for work.

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Having been down that road a few times.
by r. proffitt Forum moderator Mar 2, 2015 1:40AM PST

My wife has this under 200 Asus xa200c that we popped a 240GB SSD (under 99 bucks) and it cleans the clock of old core2duo machines. Boots in under 15 seconds cold, resumes from hibernation in under 5 seconds and from sleep in under 3 seconds. It was a Woot.com refurb and similar new laptops at amazon's best sellers are 250 bucks. (sans the SSD of course.)

Those parts are often hard to dispose of and why I usually just send it off as-is and move forward.
Bob

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Yeah, Woot and others have some pretty good deals.
by cwatkin Mar 2, 2015 2:43AM PST

I don't know which CPU your Asus has, but I looked up one and found a 1.5 GHZ Celeron Dual Core. It still ranks just below the Core 2 Duo I have in terms of RAW processing power. That doesn't include the fact that the newer but cheaper Celeron has better memory access, can do SATA 3.0, much better onboard video, and much better power efficiency.

Either way, I don't "need" another laptop sitting around right now. I will give it 1 or 2 tries on eBay and then send it down the road to the recyclers. If it had been some old XP unit, that would have been a no-brainer but this one was recent enough to consider.

I happen to have a little Celeron Dual Core based netbook. I believe it is the 1.4GHZ version of what you have in 1.5GHZ. I put an SSD in it and use it as a media PC. The onboard graphics have never let me down on any video content. Definitely not bad for what I paid for it and what I use it for...

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