Laptop Extremely Slow At BIOS Level and Up

Appletax

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Northern Michigan
Got a cheap HP laptop that's about 1 year old that is extremely slow to do anything from the moment it's powered on. Pressing a BIOS key (like F9 to choose boot options) takes forever to load. After waiting a long time, Windows 10 finally loads to an error screen. I can get it to load a bootable USB drive but it's very slow, too.

Things I have tried:
  • Hard reset (removed the battery, pressed the start button)
  • Reseated RAM and tested it (0 errors found)
  • CPU temp is 51c
  • Used BIOS recovery to reload the last known good BIOS. Reset the BIOS.
 
I would have thought that resetting the BIOS would have cured this symptom.

Maybe try loading the latest BIOS version but you're probably looking at a defective mobo. At least on a desktop you can remove the kybd and such. Not much you can do with a laptop but a thorough physical inspection.
 
We have had some laptops is the shop with failing msata drives on the motherboard that caused similar issues like you mentioned caused by bios timing out trying to mount the bad msata.

It has a standard 2.5" SATA drive. I unplugged it with no success. I also try to boot from a USB drive which works but is extremely slow to load.

Strip it down to the bare minimum including unplugging the onboard KB and mouse then see what happens.

Did this on top of removing the HDD and it's still uber slow.

And the error screen says ... ?

That Windows 10 needs to be repaired with a repair ISO or something along those lines. I intended on nuking and paving since the computer was bought by my grandma so I wanted to make it like-new again for her.

The motherboard is uses is the DA0U8CMB6B0 or 828168-001, -601. I can only find used ones and they start out at $75 shipped. I told my grandma to just give it back to my uncle (she was going to pay him $100 for it) since it doesn't make sense to buy a $279 computer (new) that's been abused for $175.
 
Is there a problem with the hard drive that is causing the BIOS to hang while it waits for the drive to respond? Remove the hard drive and power it on to see.
I had a very similar problem. Disconnected the HDD booted a Live Linux and it booted as normal. HDD plugged back in and slow again.
 
Try reseat the HDD again, and try booting using the safe mode if possible.
Use a paper rubber to clean the RAM pins.

Run the chkdsk command to scan the HDD for error.

Also seems to me that the mobo could have the faulty capacitor(s) that needed to be checked as well.

Hope this helps,
Bill
Tech support manager.
 
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