IT help needed please

[Garden Carpet]

Help!!! after the two powercuts last night I downloaded some drivers for the touchpad and the darn laptop froze.. wouldnt allow me to switch off properly so I had to use the fast method . I can now open to the desktop but have no live icons and cant use start etc. I can open it in safe mode but cant get online with it. Luckily my mother had left her laptop here or I would be a very unhappy WABber. Anyone any idea as to the proble/solution. Thanks
jaki

[Paul mabbott]

If you start in safe mode you should be able to ask the computer to reload itself, that is, the earlier settings - it will, I'm afraid, depend rather on the machine as to what you have to do ...
Alternative, did you have an antivirus-recovery programme installed (Norton &c)? If so, you should be able to reboot and reinstall your original settings (although when this happened to me Norton failed - one of the reasons I use AVG now).

Hopefully someone else can give you more constructive advice .....
Good luck, Paul

Originally Posted by Garden Carpet

Help!!! after the two powercuts last night I downloaded some drivers for the touchpad and the darn laptop froze.. wouldnt allow me to switch off properly so I had to use the fast method . I can now open to the desktop but have no live icons and cant use start etc. I can open it in safe mode but cant get online with it. Luckily my mother had left her laptop here or I would be a very unhappy WABber. Anyone any idea as to the proble/solution. Thanks
jaki

[Garden Carpet]

I have asked it to go to earlier working settings.. unfortunatly it didnt work. Thanks Paul... do you think strong words will help?
jaki

[jennyb]

Thrash it with birch twigs and if that doesn't work, throw it out the window!

Sorry - not much help, I've had bad week with my PC too

Jenny

[Garden Carpet]

lol Jenny.. what a lovely idea.. I had thougth of hawthorn... or holly.. more painful do you think?
jaki

[onionade]

Its hard to say what has happened there, could be any number of things, you kinda need to try and diagnose it a bit further, a suggestion would be that some important windows files have become corrupt and no longer work hence not booting up properly.

as it is booting up are there any error warnings ?

if so then write it down and type the error into google as you see it and find out how other people have dealt with the problem.

failing that you may need to role back your driver file to the previous one (oiriginal driver) maybe it is conflicting with some other software or failed to install properly ? you can do this by right clicking -> my computer -> properties -> device manager -> human interface properties (or something along those lines) and change the driver back to its original (this should be a setting called role back driver)

you can (hopefully?) accomplish this by borrowing a USB mouse from someone and plugging that into your laptop or using the keys (it is possible using the arrow buttons, tab etc) or just do all this in safe mode where hopefully most of your hardware works fine no ?

hope this helps ?

good luck (failing that you can always try and reinstall windows ?) <- not as daunting as you might think, i do it routinely.

[eeyore]

if its insured you could drop it on the floor or chuck it and claim it was stolen
they dont call me honest eeyore for nuthin............................................ ............. in fact they dont call me that at all

[SteveA]

Hi Jaki,

Try a repair installation of XP - Microsoft: Windows XP Pro FAQ - Tek-Tips - print the page out and follow it through.

Or take a look at How to Repair Install:
and Perform a Repair Installation
and Repair XP too

Pick the one you like the look of to follow. Basically, you are just refreshing the Windows files - any updates will need to be installed afterwards but all your programs and files should remain intact.

Do you think this might be time to rethink your backup strategy ?

[Tormentil]

XP's "System Restore" is hardly ever much good. Switch it off when you're sorted and get something like Norton's Ghost,

[Garden Carpet]

Thank you all for your help with this problem. It is now sorted and I am back on my own laptop. A small donation (sorry it will be small ) will be made to WAB to say thanks for the help.
jaki

[SteveA]

Jaki was able to access Windows via Safe Mode so I had her create a new User account and boot into that to test it (a repair install was out because the installer CD couldn't be found).

That worked fine so the problem lay within her original User account - something corrupted - not easy for me to fix remotely, perhaps - lots of command-line rebuilding - not too many Windows users would be happy or confident doing that 'in the dark'.

Workaround - I decided to stay with the new User profile and I was allowed access to the laptop remotely to pull all the Documents, etc. over to the new account - as luck would have it, the PC uses AOL so hardly any more needed to be done for email, address books, etc..

Whilst I was 'in' the laptop, I added some extra passive security, ran a major cleanup and added a Backup program - Jaki, that's your next job - get your data safely stored away from that machine - then give it a defrag!



It was a pleasure to work with you, Jaki - you instinctively knew not to interrupt me, which made it easy for me to make progress. I hope you can remember some of the things I showed you - a lot of it will be useful for future PC 'housekeeping'.

[Garden Carpet]

thank you Steve.. it was a pleasure watching an expert at work..... remember???? whats that... lol... have slept since then
jaki

[Paul mabbott]

What a relief and well done, Steve! So many of us are dependent on computers yet have very little knowledge of all the things that can (and do) go wrong or how to deal with them .... I hope my own backup system is good enough!

Originally Posted by Garden Carpet

thank you Steve.. it was a pleasure watching an expert at work..... jaki

[onionade]

Proper job steveA, glad the situation has been resolved (windows is such a nightmare sometimes!)

[Alan]

That's really good of you to do that Steve - buy that man a pint (someone )..

By the way, I hope you didn't peek at Jaki's Chippendales pics while you were in her computer

Alan

[Garden Carpet]

Originally Posted by Alan

That's really good of you to do that Steve - buy that man a pint (someone )..

By the way, I hope you didn't peek at Jaki's Chippendales pics while you were in her computer

Alan

Woooaaaa.. there are chippendale pics on my puter.... where!!!!!!!
jaki

[Garden Carpet]

Originally Posted by Alan

That's really good of you to do that Steve - buy that man a pint (someone )..
Alan

It was really good of him.. above and beyond the call of duty... and I did offer to buy him THREE pints... lol. Instead it was agreed that I will make a dontation to WAB.. have to wait till pay day .. or the bank manager will not be happy
jaki

[SteveA]

Had the XP disc been available - http://www.informationweek.com/share...leID=189400897 would have been the first option.

Originally Posted by Fred Langa

Rebuild, repair, or refresh an existing XP installation without losing data, and without having to reinstall user software, reformat, or otherwise destructively alter the setup.

(Same process as linked to in Post 8 but probably a better description.)

This will fix most non-virus/trojan/spyware problems in Windows XP - 30-40 minutes and it's sorted!

For those of you who might like to try this out for yourselves at some point (or, if you'd like to update your original or SP1 XP CD to Service Pack 2 level, start with:-

Originally Posted by Fred Langa

The First Fork In The Road
The no-reformat reinstall operation starts with a normal boot from an XP setup CD. Ideally, to save time, use a setup CD that's been "slipstreamed" to include the SP1 and SP2 patches and upgrades. (Need info on slipstreaming? See Langa Letter: How To Save An Hour (Or More) On XP Installs - News by InformationWeek and also this http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase...slipstream.asp

I think my fix was an acceptable alternative - not quite a bodge!

And stop talking about beer - I'm a recovering sober!