buckdog05

K, I'll the Vista system recovery then, thanks

I have heard of these drivers but don't know how to install them without a floppy drive. The model of the computer is Compaq Presario C762NR Notebook PC, and I looked on the Compaq website for SATA drivers but couldn't find them under the "Windows XP" section. IN fact, there was almost nothing under the Windows XP Section, will I have trouble installing wireless drives and the likes after XP is installed?

Thanks. So a bad HD could be causing the frezing frequent reboots?

I'd just try to play the video with VLC, an open-source media player that will play pretty much anything and is available for free download here: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ It's much better than Windows Media player and doesn't have annoying issues like this. Hope that helps!

I am working on my friend's Compaq Laptop with Vista because she was complaining about it crashing constantly. I booted it up and ran CHKDSK, and it completed successfully and the computer restarted back into Windows. When I put in her password, it logged me in and I was able to connect to my Wireless Network, but then the computer froze and I rebooted it. This time it froze right after the login, so because she said if I had to reinstall the operating system that she wanted XP and not Vista, I popped an XP Pro disk into the computer and started it up. When it got to the screen where you choose the partition to install Windows on, though, it says "Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in the computer." I assume the HD is good because CHKDSK completed without any problems, so why won't XP see the drive? I could go in and reformat it with Partition Magic, but I would like to maintain the current partition structure in order to preserve my friend's files. Thanks!

Ok, it just froze again (after skipping chkdsk after another reboot), and the CPU usage is at 4%. This thing is driving me nuts!

I just ran Chkdsk again, and this time it froze at 67% of "checking free space." I'll try to see if an app is taking up lots of CPU, but I doubt it as I just recovered system to factory condition (twice). Thanks!

I am working on a laptop that was very slow and seemed to have a rogue antivirus program on it. I tried installing the normal scanning software, but the computer kept rebooting and freezing during the install and scan so I figured I'd just back up the data and run the HP recovery wizard to bring it back to the factory condition. I did this, and it's faster than it was before, but every three minutes or so, everything will freeze up and it takes it a minute to unfreeze. I tried running chkdsk (it made me restart and ran before Windows started), but it got stuck on the last step and hung at 59% for hours so I did a hard shut down and rebooted into Vista. I am thinking that the hard drive is prob bad but wanted to get a second opinion. Thanks!

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll try all of that and also run a spyware scan to see if the computer is infected.

For some reason the guest account has become the administrator, and when I go to the user accounts part of the control panel, all of the other accounts show up as standard users. When I try to change them, it asks me to log in as an admin and puts "guest" in as the username. I click "ok" and it seems to authenticate so I change the user that I am on (not guest) to an administrator but when I exit the control panel and reopen it my account is no longer an administrator account. Also, when I delete accounts (I have 4 accounts including the guest and I only want one), it acts like they are being deleted but they don't actually delete. When I log in as "guest" and try to control the users from there, I run into the same problems. Anyone know how I can get Vista to delete accounts on the computer and change standard accounts to administrator accounts? Thanks!

I am working with a computer that was stuck in an endless loop in the Windows XP Boot menu, in other words, when the power button was pressed, the Windows XP Loading Screen would appear for a few seconds, than a screen would come up asking if I wanted to start the computer in safe mode, normally, or use the last known configuration. All the options were tried and the computer always would go back to the boot menu. I had seen this problem before, and have fixed it before by using CHKDSK from the Windows XP Recovery Council so I inserted my Windows XP disk and tried this and a half-hour later the computer still was having the same problem. I also tried doing "fixmbr," but decided against it after the prompt told me that it may make the data on the hard drive inaccessible (oh, and I forgot to mention that the user of this computer did NOT back up his files and that he uses the computer for his business). I figured that I would have to reformat the hard drive and reinstall Windows to make the computer work so I hooked the hard drive up to an external USB 2.0 enclosure attached to a working computer running Windows XP. When I double clicked on the drive (that came up as "local disk") in My Computer, I got an error message stating that there was a problem with the "inpage operation." I did some research on "inpage operations," and figured out that something was probably wrong with the hard drive. I than found a free program called "testdisk," that sounded like it could fix my problem, so I tried writing a new boot record with testdisk and the hard drive would still not come up in explorer, although I now get an error saying that the disk is not formatted and that asks me if I would like to format the disk. I tried looking for lost partitions and than saving the partition table back to the disk but still had no luck. Next, I decided to run chkdsk again through the command prompt (making sure to run it as "chkdsk g: r\" to make it run on the right disk and this time got a long line of "File Record Segment X is unreadable" followed by a shorter line of "inserting an index entry into index $0 of file 25." On the first line of errors, there would be a few consecutive "segments," than it would skip some and would display more consecutive segments. After this the hard drive would still not open in explorer, so I decided to run a program called "photorec" that came in the same zip file as "testdisk," and claims to be able to recover lost files form hard drives. It is running right now, has already found hundreds of pictures and documents (which is great), and estimates 9 hours to finish. My question is, is there any way to boot to the drive without reformatting and reinstalling Windows, and if I do reformat and reinstall, is the disk safe to use or is is likely to crash again? Of course I am highly recommending a backup solution to prevent hassles like this in the future. Thanks a ton and sorry for the superlong message!

Would this be a good power supply tester: http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=p...1&ct=result

Thanks! I've used compressed air to clean all of the contacts on the power supply and RAM and even tried replacing the RAM, but the computer still won't power up. I have also tried taking out all of the PCI cards (video is onboard) None of the fans in the computer start, but when I hit the power button, I hear a buzzing noise in the power supply itself. When I replace the OEM power supply with the heavy-duty one that I pulled from a working computer, the hard drive turns on when I turn on the computer, but the fan over the CPU doesn't go on, and no video is displayed. One strange thing is that as soon as I flip the switch on the back of the power supply (the heavy duty one), the fans in it turn on. Any other suggestions? Thanks!

My friend's computer won't boot and I figured that the power supply is bad. I thought this also because when I pressed the power button on the computer, I could hear the power supply struggling but not powering the computer. I have a power supply (a 450watt one) from another computer that I know works that I installed in the computer that won't boot, and it still won't boot, but the hard drive starts spinning as soon as I flip the switch on the power supply. I'm just making sure that the power supplies are compatible and that my friend's brother's motherboard is really dead and that it is not a power supply issue. Thanks!

So I just create a text file with the code provided and double click to run it? Should I back up the registry before I run the file, or is it safe to just run it? I am new at inf files! Thanks!

I am working with someone who was using Outlook Express 6 as her email program on Windows 2000 Pro and I recommended that she switch to Thunderbird to help control spam. Long story short, we decided that it was best to stay with a program that she knew well, but I can not get downloaded messages to open with Outlook Express like they did before. When she double clicks a message that is attached to another message (like how Yahoo does Fwds) inside of Outlook Express, it opens up inside of Thunderbird instead of Outlook Express. I changed Outlook Express to the default mail handler, and tried to make Outlook Express the default program for .eml files by saving an email to My Documents, right clicking on the file, clicking "Open With," choosing "Browse," and selecting Outlook Express by going to c-program files-outlook express-msin. When I do this and check the little box that says "always open with," Outlook Express comes up when she opens one of these messages, but the message does not come up. Also, the icon on these messages is different than it was before. What am I doing wrong? Thanks!

Thanks a ton, I will try this out and let you know how it goes!

I have been having a problem where Business Contact Manager in Outlook 2003 under Windows XP Pro SP2 continually has errors and has to close or restart, rendering it useless and Outlook use extremely annoying. I would like to ditch Contact Manager altogether because it is only being used as business address book, but need the address that it once held. I figured I'd extract the Contact Manager data file and export the data to another format on another computer, but the data file was not in the location of the other Outlook data files, so my questions are: 1. Is this extraction and conversion even possible and 2. Where is the Business Contact Manager Data file located? Thanks!