How To Resurrect A HP Touchpad

The HP Touchpad, a powerful large screen tablet that was discontinued almost the moment it was manufactured due to HP abandoning their WebOS operating system. The following firesale saw a large number of Touchpads released into the wild and they continue to be a favourite with tech savvy users who install an Android dual boot on their tablet.

Sometimes it ‘ain’t over ’till it’s over

One known issue is Touchpad’s failing to boot up when the battery is depleted. Many users find that after some time, when their Touchpad battery reaches low levels, it refuses to charge and eventually turns itself off never to light up again. There was a time when Ebay was full of bricked Touchpads due to users, having sat them on charge for a few weeks, presumed it was dead forever.

There are a few simple tricks that may resurrect your Touchpad if you have had this issue:
The first thing to try is a hard reboot, press the Power button, the Home button and the Volume Up button all at the same time and keep them pressed for about 10 seconds. If this doesn’t get any response, it’s likely you have a discharged battery so try one of these charging tricks.

Try stack charging. Due to some very odd decisions by HP, the Touchpad will not accept a full charge once it is depleted because the charging software requires a certain amount of power to get itself going, but it takes a few seconds to decide that this is the case. So you can kickstart it by repeatedly plugging your Touchpad into a laptop or desktop USB, waiting until it recognises the device, leave it a few seconds, then unplugging, and repeating this process up to 50 times, allowing a little charge to stack up each time. Once the HP logo appears on your Touchpad, quickly plug it into the charger supplied by HP.

Try trickle charging. The official charger and lead HP supply with the Touchpad allows higher than usual charge voltage, sometimes just using a mobile phone charger that has a lower charge rate will if left for 48 hours trickle charge enough to reboot the device and push it into a proper charging cycle.

Try the Touchstone.  The HP Touchstone is a conductive charging dock that was launched with the Touchpad, if you have access to one, just sit your dormant Touchpad in the dock and leave it 24 hours, the conductive charging takes longer, but doesn’t use the physical connection so if the issue is with either your charger or your Touchpad charging socket this may help bypass it.

A word of caution, if you do have a bricked Touchpad, don’t just sell it on, remember if you ave not been able to access it, if the new user does get your old device working again, any personal information and media, saved passwords or accounts will then be accessible to them.

[Image via Russ Payne]