Windows 10: Dead/dying laptop

I have a 7 year old HP laptop that has been totally bomb-proof, until yesterday. The cooling fan had been getting a bit noisy, and yesterday it finally locked up. Windows would not run without the cooling fan operating.

I ordered a new fan overnight, and this afternoon I had the lovely task of ripping my laptop apart. Naturally the fan was deep in the belly of the beast, but I found a good guide and I think I got it successfully reinstalled. Feeling pretty proud of myself, I fired it up... And no luck. After a while I realized my keyboard wasn't working properly, so I took it apart and reseated the keyboard ribbon cable and now that works right.

But I still have a problem with Windows booting up. Various things happen:
* Sometimes the blue window icon displays with the spinning circle below it, and after a few seconds the spinning circle stops.
* Sometimes the boot process goes into an error detection operation. It says preparing to repair (or something like that), diagnosing your PC, automated repair could not repair your system, and then there are several options to do various troubleshooting things.
* I've tried all of those troubleshooting options except resetting my PC. I couldn't restore to a restore point.
* I had an Acronis image backup from the night before the disk died, so I restored that back up. No change, same behavior.

I'm past due for a new laptop, but I really would like to keep this one around to get data off it and keep using it in the background for a while. Any suggestions how I might resurrect this old beast?

Gary

:)

 

Best laptop under $800??

Well the last one I suggested seems to be the best for 650$

EDIT: to facilitate your search...

Laptop GFX benchmark list

Laptop CPU Benchmark list

 

Symbian is dead. We have bought a dying platform.

Symbian is not dead or dying! Symbian is time tested, reliable! The UI improved greatley with Anna! I do not use any third party UIs with Anna on my N8. Any kind of apps for daily use are there in the store! Some developers shifted to Andorid because of
"dying" symbian but it is not an issue! Any app can be ported frm one OS to another - matter of time and will. Developers will be only happy if they will be able to port their apps to Symbian in order to increase their sales. So, there is no way Nokia/Symbian
is dying! It is transforming but not dying. MS is greatest soft developer and Nokia is greatest phone producer! Imagine what tey can do together! The only worry is that competiton should be there! Some peacfull "war" between Samsung, Nokia and Apple should
be there! Otherwise we consumers will saffer! Monopoly is the real threat to all of us.

 

Help! Laptop emergency

The first symptom sounds like overheating to me, but the second one suggests dead/dying hardware. I don't think he can even boot his pc properly.