In a strange twist – I lifted the HP Touchsmart Tx2 tablet to see if I could arrange a repair to the motherboard to banish the flashing indicators issue mentioned here. In that article you can see that the issues that the unit has experienced and the fixes have been unusual to say the least. However in this case it seems that the final problem relates to a bios reset and that it brings full circle the fixes applied to the machine.
The basic issue is that when powered on the machine displays two flashing leds – one at the top and one at the side of the keyboard. The article explains that its basically a failure to boot that may have different causes. In some cases a new motherboard is required or a repair to the board. My fix involved a hairdryer as mentioned before. However this particular fix is the original one suggested some time ago. Remove the CMOS battery.
It appears that for whatever reason the unit is not correctly picking up changes to the hardware – such as a replacement hard disk from a previous O/S that ran fine in the machine before testing windows 8. After a period of testing the drives were swapped and the next time the machine was rebooted – the problem returned. The difficulty is that it has multiple causes and each time it appears you should try each one. The cmas battery and the mains power and battery were removed from the laptop at the same time. This facilitates the draining of the cmos settings. Then on power up a message is displayed allowing you to see the current settings or boot the machine.
In this case the machine boots correctly into windows 7 and once the date and time were reset to current values the machine has been able to update itself and applications on it. So Lazarus returns for work and I hope this time the fix is for good. Remember – remove all power and batteries before removing the cmos battery and waiting for the cmos to discharge – 10 minutes should be enough.