Student-Contributed Wiki
An awesome team of students from our education program made this wiki.
Swiping, tapping, pinching has no effect.
Sometimes, especially in a household with children, touchscreen devices can become dirty which can prevent the screen from responding to touch.
If it’s minor dust and smudges that you think might be a problem, you can always clean the screen with a cleaning cloth.
If it’s more grimy than a cleaning cloth can handle, you can always dampen a towel or a paper towel and gently wipe the screen down.
If it’s more greasy than just water can take care of, you can try some glass cleaner or all-purpose cleaner (Like Windex™) and spray that on a paper towel and wipe.
If your screen is glistening and still unresponsive, try some of our other solutions!
If your screen is clean and there doesn’t seem to be any physical damage to the touch screen, your touch screen capabilities might be turned off. This could be the case especially if you’ve been using your computer as a classic desktop with the keyboard and mouse attached rather than like a tablet.
Check your OS settings to see if you have turned off touch screen capabilities. For Windows 8 and 10 move your mouse to the top right of your screen and then straight down to bring up the charms sidebar.
a. Click settings
b. Click Control Panel.
c. Go to Hardware and Sound.
d. Click on Pen and touch.
e. Click the touch tab.
f. Enable ‘use your finger’ as an input.
So your screen isn’t dirty, and the touchscreen capabilities are turned on, but your screen is still unresponsive to touch.
Sometimes the wiring can be lose and this can be the cause. However, because of the complexity of the device and how the components are stacked on top of the screen from behind, unless you’re very computer savvy, I wouldn’t attempt opening the computer up to try and access the screen. If you want to look at the Maintenance Guide to try to get to the screen and make sure all the wiring is secure, that would be a good place to see an exploded view. However, if you’re not comfortable completely disassembling your computer yourself, I would contact HP Customer Support and ask them what the best course of action would be.
If your screen has been damaged so badly that it need to be replaced (like if the Rove got dropped and the screen shattered), it is possible to replace according to HP but not for the faint of heart. This PDF shows all of the Rove’s components. The Screen is component #30 and an exploded view of the device can be seen on page 18 of the pdf or 10 according to the documents official page numbering. Because of the complexity of the screen and various components attached to it, HP Support here suggests that you contact HP Customer Support concerning how and the cost of such a task.
“My computer is not running as fast as it should; sometimes it doesn’t run at all! I’ve even tried turning it off and on again.”
Sometimes, if your hard drive is almost full it can slow down your computer substantially. This often times is due to the fact that you just have too many nonessential bits of information on it that need to be cleared off. Free applications such as the very popular CCleaner are designed to clean your hard drive of these leftover bytes and trim your memory usage. This can be done manually as well, but it is NOT recommended to go around your program files deleting things unless you have a very good idea of what you are doing.
To check and see where your hard drive capacity is at:
a. First go into “My Computer” or “Computer”
b. Right click on the main hard drive (the hard drive you use for most of your data) and select “Properties” from the pull down menu.
c. From here, there should be a pie chart showing you the amount of space you have free versus the amount of space that is used with the legend stating “Free Space” and “Used Space”. If you have a lot of “Used Space” and very little “Free Space”, this could be one of the reasons why your computer is running so slowly.
If you want to replace your hard drive and get one with a larger capacity, you can follow our replacement guide here.
Another reason why your computer could be running slowly is if your RAM or Random Access Memory is full or doesn’t have enough free space to run the programs as quickly as you would like. If your RAM is full, your computer can’t run as many programs as efficiently as you may want it to. It may be faulty or you may just want to upgrade to RAM with larger capacity.
You can check to see how much RAM your computer is currently using by pressing Ctrl + Alt + Delete and accessing the Task Manager and looking under the “Processes” tab under the section called “Memory”. This will tell you how much of your memory is being used by your computer currently.
If you have some programs that are taking up a large amount of your RAM and they are unnecessary to what you’re doing, closing out those programs could help your computer function faster.
However, if you choose to upgrade your RAM, you can follow our replacement guide here.
Sometimes, various particles like dust, dirt, or fibers can get into the different components of your computer and this can slow down the functionality by creating interference or resistance to certain components. To get all the debris out of your computer, follow our guide for taking off the backside of your computer here and used compressed air to get all that lint out!
Computers tend to not run as well if they’re above the ideal temperature and overheated. Because of this, your fan is a crucial part to keeping the temperature of your computer low. If your computer is overheating your fan might be too clogged with dust to effectively cool down your computer or it’s completely broken. Follow our replacement guide here to get the steps for replacing that fan or here to take off the backside of your computer to clean out the fan component.
More commonly experienced with laptops and smartphones, if your monitor is ever warm or hot to the touch it might be overheating.
If your computer seems to be heating up and you think your fan functions fine, make sure you have your computer in a decently ventilated room. If you have the ENVY laying on your bed or couch the material may be covering up the vents and preventing air from cooling the machine. In short spurts you won’t do any long term damage, but without maintenance the cotton will clog your fan.
Like previously stated, your fan is a crucial part to keeping the temperature of your computer low. If your computer is overheating your fan might be too clogged with dust to effectively cool down your computer or it’s completely broken. Follow our replacement guide here to get the steps for replacing that fan.
Sometimes, regardless of the cautionary steps we take, things just break. If your computer is overheating and you don’t hear or feel the fan engage (usually you can hear it as it blows hot air out or feel the hot air being blown out), the problem might just be with your actual fan component. See our repair guide here for more info to resolve this.
Keeping in mind this device only boasts a peak run time of 3 hrs 15 mins, if you are constantly plugging in consider these solutions.
Even if you keep your battery in tip top shape all good things come to an end and batteries have a 2-3 year lifetime on average. Remember to avoid extreme temperatures to preserve life. If you have the time its also a great idea to run the power down about 5% and then charge your device back to full in one go which prevents capacity from decreasing.
However, batteries do die on occasion and sometimes just need to be replaced when they no longer can retain a charge. You can follow our repair guide here to replace your computer battery.
If your flash drive can’t connect or your earbuds aren’t working when they’re plugged-in, check these fixes.
Computers don’t generally have real problems with the USB drive or the headphone port unless those components specifically are broken. However, one thing you could try first before taking your computer apart and replacing components is to restart your computer - letting it fully turn off and then turn it back on. Sometimes, simple things like this will reset the software in the computer and hopefully the restart will prompt the computer to acknowledge the ports. If you’ve restarted your computer and the ports still aren’t working, make sure the individual components you’re plugging into the computer work. Use a different computer for reference.
If rather than restarting your computer, you want to try and force it to turn on the headphone jack, you can try the following steps. For Windows 8 and 10 move your mouse to the top right of your screen and then straight down to bring up the charms sidebar.
d. Click on Sound.
e. Right click your Device in the pop-up window
f. Click connect
If this does not work see our audio jack repair manual here.
If the device you are plugging in definitely works then the problem could be with the USB board inside the computer. For issues with a faulty connection check out our guide here for how to replace it.