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"How much do I hate XP........"

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Mon 28/02/05 at 15:47
Regular
"Hal is that you?"
Posts: 16
Please can someone advise me on how to fix my boyfriends computer that I inadvertently screwed over the weekend.....

He has XP Pro on it but on SP1 - Broadband so I installed Lavasoft Ad-aware to find it had over 200 objects and nasty data miners.... During the clean up I kicked off the Norton/symantec live updates which then froze the puter and I had to crash out of it. On rebooting the puter up again I found that none of the .exe files can be found and none of the programs will open......

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated......

Cheers

Novice - you dont say.......
Tue 01/03/05 at 11:37
Regular
"bing bang bong"
Posts: 3,040
cookie monster wrote:
> To be honest, if i found all of those objects and then had the same
> trouble i would just reformat anyway.

True, but you are probably one of the extreme minority who know how. I'm very reluctant to remotely advise someone to flatten and reinstall their Operating System until it's clear that there's no alternative solution.
Tue 01/03/05 at 10:49
Regular
"+34 Intellect"
Posts: 21,334
To be honest, if i found all of those objects and then had the same trouble i would just reformat anyway.
Tue 01/03/05 at 10:06
Regular
"bing bang bong"
Posts: 3,040
Sounds to me like your Start Menu is broken for some reason, which is relatively trivial compared to "computer completely shanked".
Tue 01/03/05 at 10:00
Regular
"Hal is that you?"
Posts: 16
I have tried several times to do a restore with the same error message coming up and with him being a Computer User Non Technical he did not retain any of the keys for the OS as it was an OEM with the machine....hence the machine is now in the boot of my car awaiting one of our techies to have a look at it this lunchtime.

I was able to open up some of the programs last night but not via the start menu and it seems to have lost the .exe extensions on the program files.....
The files are there as I have checked but just will not open...

Oh well will let the experts have a look and hopefully can sort it out without a rebuild.

Ta for all your suggestions I think....

Novice - give in to the experts !
Mon 28/02/05 at 21:31
Regular
"Acid Casual"
Posts: 3,038
Boot from your Xp cd and hit 'r' for.... repair.
Mon 28/02/05 at 18:58
Regular
"Bicycle"
Posts: 4,899
Try a System Restore / Re-Installing a program and seeing if that works.
Mon 28/02/05 at 17:29
Regular
"bing bang bong"
Posts: 3,040
I read an interesting article recently which claimed that it's almost impossible for a woman to ask for technical support without all the men in the vicinity instantly degenerating into chauvinists. If only I could find the url. Never mind, I'm sure it can't be true. But I digress...

The fact that it's booting Windows okay gives cause for hope. Exactly what error message does it display when you run, say, notepad? Does it display the same/similar message for every program? Are there any programs that run okay - if so, which ones?
Mon 28/02/05 at 17:22
Regular
"Hal is that you?"
Posts: 16
Yeah I know and believe me if I could have distracted him at the time I certainly would have done but he was sat there watching - my knowledge is limited but his is even less. The puter will boot up fine but the moment you go into run a program an error message comes up listing the path and that it could not find the particular .exe to run. I have tried a restore and even via a DOS prompt but when it boots back up again it still will not run any program....

It has been suggested to check the .dll files and where the .exe files reside , but otherwise it sounds like a rebuild is the only option. - God I might as well lay back and think of England for the forseeable future.......

Thanks for all the tips muchly appreciated....

Still a novice.
Mon 28/02/05 at 17:07
Regular
"l33t cs50r"
Posts: 2,956
When he comes home, deny eveything and resort to oral sex, which will destract him (as with all men) into forgetting about it or remotley getting upset when he finds out!;)

On a serious note though. How far is it booting? Are you managing to get into Windows? If so, try a system restore first before resorting to blind panic/oral sex etc etc!;)

It is possible that it's gone tot he great crashed XP grabeyard in the sky!:(

I had a similar experience with my wife moaning about the laptop being slow. After a quick scan, I discovered 14 variations of NetSky at which point it promptly fell over and died resulting in a full reinstall! (And she wonders why I won't let her near my PC!?

Simple equation:

Woman + PC = Bad idea
Woman + PC / let try and be useful = Very bad idea!
Woman + borked PC x oral sex = boyfriend who really couldn't care!;)
Mon 28/02/05 at 16:52
Regular
"bing bang bong"
Posts: 3,040
At exactly what point does it start to fall apart? Does the computer boot as you'd expect it to? Is it only when you've got to your desktop and you go to run a program that things start to go wrong?

What sort of error messages does it display?

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