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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.......
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.......
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Boot from your Xp cd and hit 'r' for.... repair.
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 !
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 !
Sounds to me like your Start Menu is broken for some reason, which is relatively trivial compared to "computer completely shanked".
To be honest, if i found all of those objects and then had the same trouble i would just reformat anyway.
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.
> 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.
God bless disk images.
I'd personally reinstall.
What I do nowadays is keep an 'Installers' folder, downloading all program installers to there and keeping them.
When it comes to re-install time (6 months), you just back up your important files as well as the installers folder, reinstall, then put them back on.
Problem solved.
What I do nowadays is keep an 'Installers' folder, downloading all program installers to there and keeping them.
When it comes to re-install time (6 months), you just back up your important files as well as the installers folder, reinstall, then put them back on.
Problem solved.
My advice stick with what you know.
[URL]http://img26.exs.cx/img26/8692/girlcomputer6wq.jpg[/URL]
[URL]http://img26.exs.cx/img26/8692/girlcomputer6wq.jpg[/URL]
Would you be prepared to advise your Grandmother, say, to do the same, given that she's hundreds of miles away, has no aptitude for technical things and doesn't even know what a 'driver' is? It's all well and good saying what you would do but they are not you, they may not spend even an hour a week even thinking about a computer and they don't want the hassle of spending an entire weekend going through this frightening voodoo "reinstall" process.
Put it this way, if the gearbox in your car broke down, would you take the advice of some guy on the internet to take it apart and put it back together again or would you pay someone who knew what they were doing to do it instead? What if the central heating in your house failed, would you be willing to strip it out and rebuild it? For 95% of people a computer is a magic beige box that just works, just like your dishwasher is to you (except it breaks a lot more often). For those people who don't know anything about computers and who have no interest in knowing anything about computers other than how to book holidays online, an OS reinstall is a major major headache they can do without, and advising someone matter-of-factly over the internet to wipe Windows and start again is entirely non-trivial.
Having said that, it didn't stop a DELL telephone operator in India spending four hours on the phone guiding a little old lady I know through a Windows reinstall, heh. It worked afterwards too 'n' all.
Put it this way, if the gearbox in your car broke down, would you take the advice of some guy on the internet to take it apart and put it back together again or would you pay someone who knew what they were doing to do it instead? What if the central heating in your house failed, would you be willing to strip it out and rebuild it? For 95% of people a computer is a magic beige box that just works, just like your dishwasher is to you (except it breaks a lot more often). For those people who don't know anything about computers and who have no interest in knowing anything about computers other than how to book holidays online, an OS reinstall is a major major headache they can do without, and advising someone matter-of-factly over the internet to wipe Windows and start again is entirely non-trivial.
Having said that, it didn't stop a DELL telephone operator in India spending four hours on the phone guiding a little old lady I know through a Windows reinstall, heh. It worked afterwards too 'n' all.
gamesfreak wrote:
> What I do nowadays is keep an 'Installers' folder, downloading all
> program installers to there and keeping them.
I have one of those: it contains such gems as Firefox 0.7, Napster and Windows 3.1. Slightly flawed, that.
Somebody should write a portage style system for Windows, and persuade all software developers everywhere, ever to adopt its standards - then we could have an application profile that gets restored on a reinstall.
On my desk by Monday please.
> What I do nowadays is keep an 'Installers' folder, downloading all
> program installers to there and keeping them.
I have one of those: it contains such gems as Firefox 0.7, Napster and Windows 3.1. Slightly flawed, that.
Somebody should write a portage style system for Windows, and persuade all software developers everywhere, ever to adopt its standards - then we could have an application profile that gets restored on a reinstall.
On my desk by Monday please.
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