Fixing a Dell 700m Laptop with Slow XP Start-up and No Sound (Serving Home)

This Dell 700m laptop took over half an hour to start up to the desktop and every mouse click took long time to respond. The hard drive light was always on. I checked the hard drive property. The 40 GB hard drive was almost full. After deleting the temporary files, it was till 95% full. To resolve the issue, I replaced the 40GB hard drive by a 160GB hard drive. To reload the OS, it will take a few hours from loading the XP to installing all the drivers. I used a freeware EaseUS Todo Backup to clone the disk over and it works. It was still a bot slow. I found that the hard drive had file compression set on to reduce the space. It must be taking time. For a much larger hard drive, I unchecked the file compression.

The second problem was no sound from the built-in speakers. After removing the power button cover, I found that the wires under the right hinge were cut inside. It should be due to the opening and closing of the LCD lid many times that the wires could not last. From a dead DV6000, I found a suitable cable which one end being the same which can be plugged into the motherboard and long enough to go to the speaker. The cable is also slim enough to go through the hinge and and flexible enough to twist for the opening and closing of the LCD lid. The main challenge is to solder the four little wires to the speaker. When they were done, I put on covers to the wiring joints so that the wires have less chance to break again. When I put back the cover and started the laptop again, the sound is back.

The laptop is ready to serve again at home.