And if that doesn't work you probably have some sort of hardware
problem, My desktop was having fits, same kind of behavior, I finally
found some obscure reference to "check the video card" (which was
working fine in Safe mode) and shonuff the capacitors on the vid card
are almost all blown, not even sure how it was still working. Popped in
another vid card and booted right up no problem.
--R
On 12/30/2010 1:27 PM, LWB250 wrote:
Randy,
Probably the best thing you can do at this point is boot from the XP disk,
format the C:\ drive and do a clean install of Vista.
When you format the hard drive be sure to choose NTFS file system rather than
FAT, as Vista won't like it formatted as a FAT drive (if it will even work on
one - I don't know.)
I have a lot of XP experience with HP (I'm a certified HP desktop and laptop tech)
hardware, but not Windows Vista or 7. We are just starting to work with Windows 7
machines, and when something cacks we image it. That is, we have a "golden
image" of all our hardware that is the basic system and apps we install. If a
machine bites the big one and it's not a hardware problem like a bad hard drive, we pop a
USB drive in it, boot from that, and in about 10 minutes we have a clean install just
like it came out of the box.
Same thing if a hard drive fails. Pop a new drive in the machine, boot from
USB, and away we go in roughly 10 minutes (there is some post configuration we
have to do for authentication and Active Directory, but that only takes a
minute or two to do.)
Try this - at this point you really have nothing to lose. Let us know what you
come up with.
Dan
--- On Thu, 12/30/10, R A Bennell<b...@mts.net> wrote:
From: R A Bennell<b...@mts.net>
Subject: [MBZ] OT - computer issues
To: "Mercedes Discussion List"<mercedes@okiebenz.com>
Date: Thursday, December 30, 2010, 1:04 PM
Since many of you folks appear to be
computer savy, let me seek your input, please.
I have an HP laptop - probably about 4 years old, that has
a problem. My son was using it and it started to act up and
he was in the midst of his Masters program and could not be
without it, so we got him a new one and this one has sat on
the top of the piano for a year or more. I'd like to get it
going again and my wife is tired of looking at it sit
there.
It is an intel dual core chip setup with 4 Gigs of RAM etc,
running Windows Vista Home Premium.
I have no previous experience with Vista so that does not
help much.
It will start to boot up and then just sit there with a
blank grey screen. I can force it to boot by holding down
the on/off switch. It will then re-start and offer me
the choice to fire up in safe mode. It, of course
offers the suggestion that I put the Windows disk in and
repair the problem but that has been done a couple of times
without much success. It might work for a time or two but
then it goes back to the scenario I described above.
It will boot to safe mode and will permit me to access the
net so yesterday I downloaded the malware software you folks
were talking about and ran a full scan last evening. It took
2 hous and looked at over 500 thousand files and found only
2 infected things which it has apparently fixed. That
has not solved the problem, although I acknowledge that I
have not tried to run the windows disk to repair it since
killing the two bad items.
I don't care about any of the data on the computer. My son
had good backup and moved on to the new computer without
issues so he does not want anything from this one.
Vista does not appear to make it easy to wipe the drive
clean and start over. I cannot help but feel that might be
advantageous. I would pay for a Windows 7 licence if I
was satisfied that this thing was not having hardware
issues. I don't wnat to spend the money for the new
operating system if it has other issues until those issues
are addressed.
I have Windows XP and Windows 2000 disks available as well
that could be installed at least to try it.
Anyone have good suggestions on what I should do to get
this thing up and running?
Randy
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_______________________________________
http://www.okiebenz.com
For new and used parts go to www.okiebenz.com
To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/
To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to:
http://okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com
_______________________________________
http://www.okiebenz.com
For new and used parts go to www.okiebenz.com
To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/
To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to:
http://okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com
