Thanks for your responses so far. Now this neighbor has a new issue! The
dysfunctional Dell is just sitting there.
He has an old IBM Thinkpad 2657 with a 20 GB HDD and 512 MB of RAM and
running Windows 98. It's been in a closet for months (years?), Apparently it
did not have anti-virus protection so he got a virus,
He reformatted the HDD but now wonders what to do to get an anti-virus
program before trying to go online again. He's tried Best Buy and Staples
and neither has an anti-virus program that will work on Windows 98. He
thought he might upgrade to Windows XP, thinking he could get a good price
on an upgrade version of XP but they don't stock that either. So the option
is to go online online to download something like Avast (which reportedly
DOES work fine on Win 98) but he's afraid of going online for fear of
infecting his newly-clean HDD.
Another thingk, as the Thinkpad reformatted the drive it reloaded the
programs that were on it before the reformat! Where'd they come from, he
wonders and of course, I haven't a clue. He wonders (as I would) whether the
Thinkpad graciously reinstalled the virus just as it reinstalled Word, and
all the Windows Office programs, a graphics program or so and I don't know
what else. I dont' think he has much on this computer. But anyway, his
question is: Is there a way to reformat the drive and Not have existing
programs reinstalled? How would he do this?
Isn't this a dilemma that you folks like to get your teeth into? MANY
Thanks in advance for your help!
Gail Miller
- Original Message -
From: Tony B ton...@gmail.com
To: COMPUTERGUYS-L@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
Sent: Friday, October 23, 2009 9:22 PM
Subject: Re: [CGUYS] Fw: Windows Live One Scan and Cleanup
Sounds like a hardware failure (likely has nothing to do with whatever
was running when it failed). Can he get into the bios and sit there as
long as he wants? Can he boot to a live cd and run an OS?
Probably not worth repairing since the Win7 notebooks just hit the
market at bargain prices.
On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 1:10 AM, Gail.Miller gail.mil...@comcast.net
wrote:
Hi ...
My neighbor just used Windows Live One Scan and Clean on his Dell laptop
and it apparently has completely crashed his computer. When it tried to
reboot after the scan he could hear the hdd whirring and the screen lit
up
for a moment with the Dell logo but then went to black and he can't
get a
picture to come back onto the monitor (excepton trying the reboot again,
it
will come back just momentarily). Then the mouse arrow appears on the
screen
(again only momentarily) and then it goes to black, the hdd (or
something)
continues to whirr and nothing else happend.
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