Weird Story of Troubleshooting a Weird Laptop Issue (Part 3)

“Is there any faster connection?”

“I can try my mobile data.”

Source

To be honest, the download speed of my home network isn’t that horrible for most of the times. Of course, you can say that 1 Megabit per second is still insanely horrible for someone living in 2019, but it should still be capable of downloading this 100MB file, just with a longer duration. Probably someone is watching YouTube in the house or some device started downloading updates automatically again...whatever, I still need to let this customer support agent download this file on my laptop. My mobile data quota resets tomorrow and I still have around 1GB left...yeah, we’ll just use that. I don’t believe that we’ll end up finishing the whole thing anyways.

Again, remember the disclaimer from the last post of this series (blog link here). If you didn’t read that, go back and start there, the posts are connected.

Just in case you’re new to this, start from the first episode then (blog link here).

So I picked my phone up, went deep into the Settings app to disable data saver before finally going into hotspot settings to turn the thing on. A new wireless network named “Potato” appeared on my laptop’s Wi-Fi connection menu. I clicked on it, typed the very long password that goes like “You are connecting to a potato.” into the input box, hit the “Connect” button while my phone gave a notification telling me that the connection succeeded. I restarted the download myself and watched it crawl…

The chat client reconnected itself briefly after the connection drop due to network switching, “let’s hope that the connection will be better this time,” he said while I watched the progress bar making tiny nudges forward every a few seconds. He should be able to see the horrible download speed on my screen, the remote desktop connection isn’t disabled...probably he had seen worse, he’s a customer support agent after all. I still remember the peeps responsible for customer support at my relative’s office, they get all sorts of weird cases every day to the extent that I sometimes feel sorry for them. So, remember to treat your customer support agents well, their lives aren’t easy at all.

“I actually feel a little bad for wasting his time waiting for this horrible internet speed…” I typed into the Discord chat as we waited for the download to make more progress. Well, at least the progress bar is moving, it’s just a matter of time then...provided that it does not fail. Mobile data here isn’t stable at all, and having that thought gave me some cold sweat - I had that experience once when downloading a 300MB file. I guess I don’t have to say how unfun is that. Oh, someone replied. Let’s see what they have to say…

“Don’t worry dude, he might be pretty happy to help you.” Uh, what? “At least he is wasting time on a less insane case. You never know what kind of funny stuff they can get if not for you, lol.” My mind went “poof” for a moment for this unexpected reply, but okay, what else can I expect from a gaming Discord server? Someone asking me to send an invite link to him?

Anyways, maybe what they said was true. I’ll just pretend that it’s like that, it makes me feel better, somehow.

Source

"Can we pause the remote desktop connection? My mobile data is limited." I picked up the phone and got amazed by the amount of data flow shown on the indicator. It was sitting at 1 Megabyte per second and jumping around there, and at this rate we don't even need half an hour to fully drain my remaining quota. I mean, I don't mind draining it, but once I hit 100% usage the carrier will fallback me to some nightmarish dial-up level speed and let's be honest that no one wants to get this hilarious time travel experience back to 2001, even for free. "Sure," he said and disconnected the remote control. And to my surprise, the indicator still shows a crazy amount of data flow. This is not good.

Out of curiosity, I summoned the lord and savior aka the Task Manager just to discover that Windows is doing its job of downloading updates in the background at the wrong time again. Microsoft, you need to know that people hate your updates and make memes out of it for reasons...okay, enough talking, right clicked on that Delivery Optimization process (or whatever it is called), end task, ticked the confirmation box responsibly and killed it. Guess what? Whoosh, the progress bar started leaping forward every a few seconds and it's done within a minute. Without further waiting, I double clicked on the installer to get the hardware diagnostic tool prepared. "How's the progress?" he asked through the chat client. "I'm installing it," I said as I clicked through the installation procedures. It's quite a long one, going through extraction and installation and another progress bar that I forgot what it was...but hey, at least it is faster than the download just now.

While waiting for the installation to complete, I have to say it one more time: Screw you, Windows, I didn't install Linux for no reason.

Immediately after the installation is complete, I ran the thing from the start menu - had to do this because I accidentally broke the search function of Windows in some ways and I don't want him to look puzzled when the hardware diagnostic tool fail to show up in the search results. "Is it done?" He asked, "Yes and I'm launching it now," I replied while passing the remote control permission back to him. The hardware diagnostic window is still white and my hard disk is still spinning…

Source

"Their hardware diagnostics tool seems to be really slow," I went for Discord again. It's been a few minutes and the LED indicator on my hard disk is still blinking. "Some say that it's even problematic," someone replied, “I won’t be surprised if it doesn’t launch at all...lol.” That sounds pretty awful but probably we’ll just wait…

We’re in the fourth minute and my hard disk is not giving sounds anymore. Nothing is using resources in the task manager, it seems to be happily stuck with a white screen leaving both of us equally puzzled. “Shall we run it again?” He suggested. I then killed the program and restarted it immediately, but it doesn’t seem to be willing to work. Now it does look like a problematic piece of software, probably that guy on Discord isn’t joking.

Out of boredom I started to randomly click on the software hoping that I actually it will shoot me a dialogue box telling me that the window isn’t responding...nope. No responses at all. I then right-clicked on the white space, and to my surprise, the seemingly familiar Internet Explorer right-click menu popped up.

“Oh my god it’s an IE wrapper.” I can’t help but express my shocked feelings on the Discord chat. When’s the last time I used a software that relies on IE…? Probably the Garena client, and that thing is pretty spaghetti as well. Internet Explorer itself is pretty bad either, else why aren’t you using it?

“Dang, IE? Why not Electron?”

“I don’t know, but it amazes me.”

Side note for those who are not tech-savvy: Electron is a Chrome wrapper widely used by desktop applications, such as Discord.

Out of a sudden, something flashed up in my mind - hold on, this might be the reason it’s not working. I quickly Alt-Tabbed into the support client, “I guess I know why it isn’t working now, give me a sec.”

Any wrapper of Internet Explorer inherits the settings of Internet Explorer itself, and I have scripts disabled on it...without scripts, it should not be able to do a thing, and hence the white screen. I went into Internet Options and reset a bunch of settings regarding scripts and restarted the software. Voila, things appeared as they should.

Well, another reason to not use an IE wrapper.

He quickly navigated around the options in the software and ran the component tests for the battery and power supply. I’m not very sure how he was feeling after things magically worked after I turned the scripts on...but if I was him probably it’ll be “well little one you gave me a TIL, and I should send this recorded video over to the engineering team so that they can have an idea on how badly they messed up on this one”. Hey, at least show an error like “scripts disabled” with a noscript tag…

He then clicked on the “Run test” button, progress bars appeared again and they filled themselves pretty quickly...and returned the result of “Cancelled” in the end.

Uh, what. No one cancelled those. He ran them for a few more times but it ends up with cancelled every time. This is getting weirder and weirder. Probably there’s a ghost sitting in my laptop or something, who knows.

Source

“I cannot be sure about the condition of your battery because all it says is ‘Cancelled’,” he sent that in the support chat client, “we should proceed with the F2 test then.”

“Do you mean the UEFI diagnostic tool?” I asked. They have a pretty nice diagnostics tool sitting somewhere deep in the system in which you can boot into it by hitting a specific key during boot, and that key is F2. “Yes,” he replied, “You can access it by pressing the F2 key before the HP logo shows up. Then, go to…” I’ll skip the long instructions here, but in short, he suggests me to check the battery using the tool. The instructions are not really applicable to me either, because my boot menu will appear before the HP logo, and I have to do it before the boot menu shows up… :P

“I have done that a few times, it didn’t give any error IDs or warnings at all.” Well, except for the not-so-optimistic battery capacity, it had lost a good half of its capacity after about 2 years of using but it still carries enough charge for me to work on it for 2 to 3 hours non-stop. So, it’s not really the battery’s fault either. And, I have been checking on it regularly since a few months back...watching the battery capacity drop as days pass is indeed depressing. Ignorance is bliss, the saying exists for a reason.

“Actually, HP does not encourage dual booting or replacing the stock Windows OS,” he said. I can fully understand why - I guess the hardware diagnostics tool relies on some code only present on their stock operating system and not on this vanilla installation of Windows 10. And to make it even more interesting, my issue with the battery draining charge while plugged in only happens when I’m on Linux (there is no evidence saying that it’s Linux that caused the issue either). With a separate OS and a non-stock Windows OS sitting together, it makes the situation more spaghetti to deal with and no support agent likes that. Even I don’t like that either.

Source

“Well, as I said, for personal and school purposes. I’m just glad that assistance is still provided despite the dual boot.” I’m sincere on this - there are ten billion ways to void a warranty in this world and switching out what is originally inside is a good one, even if it’s just software as most phone manufacturers treat it seriously. “Anyways, who should I contact if I want to send this laptop for a hardware check?” Since there’s still the possibility for a motherboard failure, I want to get it checked. It will cost me a lot to replace one on my own if I don’t do it within the warranty period.

‘You may contact a drop-off point for that,” he replied, “but you must not approach them for OS installation.” Uh, I could do that on my own if it’s really required...I know how to use their recovery images (that actually take an eternity to restore a system, I tried it once). So, “sure.” He then dropped me a link containing a list of drop-off points that I can choose to contact. After thanking him and closing the case, I went to check the list.

So the nearest one from me is sitting on the Penang island...nope, I don’t have the transport for it. No dropping this thing there and let them sort it out then. Guess I’ll have to call them the next day…

To be continued.

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