Installing 25H2 (on unsupported hardware) has partially bricked laptop.

Thanks, I've not quite given up hope yet.

JLArranz said:

When something is "hung" (provided it's not "bricked") the remedy is a "reset". What is physically a "reset" in this context?

Click to expand...

I suspect something like this tbh, the controller being latched in some non valid state. It was fully powered down for quite a while this morning pulling it all apart to change the coin cell. I looked for residual voltage and even shorted the coin cell holder for a while to pull all down to zero.

(totally unrelated but on things hanging etc.... years ago a Sony VCR model range had remotes that would suddenly freeze and stop working. Pull the batteries even for a week and no good, leave it for a month and they always worked again normally. Also heating the board (in the remote) to quite hot on a radiator would cut that months wait down to a few hours. I suspect something is latched like that here and the freeze on reboot is the culprit as it forced me to do a forced shutdown)

Weirdly and I was just playing around after putting W7 on it and after installing the graphics driver and rebooting it came up with this. This was several restarts down the line from installing the USB controller.



This now has a yellow exclamation mark.



The driver disc (CD)

Install the NECUPD720200 drivers.

Tried that, nothing changes.

I'm going to have to accept its zapped at this point I suspect. Its not worth throwing money at (14 going on 15 year old laptop) and it is usable with those two USB3 posts non functional.

I have reinstalled 25H2 again from the ISO and updated it fully and apart from this issue that occurred it seems to run well enough. Despite being 14 years it accepts Fast Start and boots in just a few seconds, way quicker than my modern main one that is fully compliant.

Just buy a USB hub to have more USB 2.0 ports and forget about the USB 3.0 ports. Inconvenient but better than throwing away the whole laptop.