hey everyone, i’m new at this, so please don’t yell at me if i sound stupid.
my problem: i was on the internet and i my laptop froze after getting bombarded with pop-ups, so i restarted it. now, when i turn it on, it gets stuck on the start up page, and freezes there and nothing i have tried to get it to work has been effective. i tried running it in safe mode, and everything else i can think of, but nothing is working. so if anyone can give me some advice on how do delete windows to start over, i would greatly appreciate it.
You could have made your self a recovery cd.
I am no way trying to be cocky (today). I know the frustrations of beign a newbie. But also try this from Microsoft.
Here is the link for (How to install and use the Recovery Console in Windows XP)
Do you by any chance have a program on your computer called wintune? or Ares, Kazaa?.. these programs are likely source of your problem if they are indeed on your computer.
I think it got infected when I was checking my mail, I’m not sure tho. I know it happened when I was on the internet. (I have Sprint DSL) I dont have anything like Kazaa on it, I learned better than that when my sisters computer crashed. I am DEFINITELY going to try that shift thing. Thanks to everyone for helping
[quote=“yngwie_69”]Hold down shift before windows starts to load, that will disable any programs from running in the background. If your comp works then
Click start, go to RUN, type msconfig, go to startup, it should show u a list a programs that start up. Its safe to uncheck all of them.
Then run adware.[/quote]
Holy shit, Yngwie! Not only is that the best response to the question so far, but it’s also the only helpfull one… Total props to you man, I’m impressed!
X3, if the computer freezes when it starts up, how exactly would you go about installing AND running Spybot? Word? 40 oz?
So, if you do what Yngwie said to do, and Windows fires up, you should go back into MSCONFIG and start enabling apps, and restarting the machine (maybe 2 or 3 apps at a time) until you find the one(s) that are locking up the computer (assuming this is the problem). Then uninstall anything that locks up the machine if possible, and run AdAware, just like Yngwie said, aswell as an antivirus.
Then once everything is happy again, download and install Firefox and use it INSTEAD of IE… It’ll probably save you another incident like this. The SPAM/Popup prevention and tabbed browsing alone are more than worth the switch. Firefox is also faster and safer to use than IE.
Easy way to tell if your problem is hardware, or just Windows wonkiness:
grab a live cd of a Linux distro (such a knoppix). Boot with that. if it seems to work fine (run a few programs, surf the web, etc), then the problem isn’t hardware, it’s Windows.
Someone brought in an old Pentium 100 laptop the other day, the floppy was bagged, no CD, they wanted it upgraded cuz Win95 wouldn’t run the virus protector. I handed him the 8 lb sledge I use for pounding in ground rods on antenna installs and they completely failed to see the humour!
So I had to explain how it was cruel like an old lady with a 23 year old poodle dragging its legs and peeing itself. Sometimes it’s just better to end the misery…
