Sony vgn-n160g XP restore

[sean112178]

ok i need some help from some better geeks than i guess i am ... i have a cgn-n160g sony vaio with XP MCE. i have restored the laptop once before thus losing the ability to create the recovery DVDs, but i have purchased them from sony.

my issue is 3 parts (a solution to any of the 3 parts would be great)

1. svchost is hogging mem and cpu til the computer gets so slow it takes forever to even get a right click menu.

- i have run avg and avast and cleared up all the viruses they found til neither has found any more but svc host is still lagging the system. leading me to issue 2.

2. i would like to restore the factory image but sadly the dvd drive no longer reads any discs (prolly broken laser) and f10 no longer starts the recovery console. i have an external dvd drive but for some reason the only way i can get bios to look there for a boot source is by excluding the hard drive as a boot source which nets me a blue screen (Stop 0x0000007B (0xF7A5B528, 0xC0000034, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)

3. i have successfully booted ophcrack from a usb drive and am hoping that someone here might be able to instruct me into how to get my memorex 8gb usb drive set to boot the iso of the restore dvd. if possible i also need some advice on if i should put both restore dvds on the usb drive and if so how.

thank you all in advance for any and all help.

PS - i have been searching forums for the past week and have not found any forums that have helped hence why i am posting here now... if you care to direct me to a forum thread that deals with this issue i would be glad to check it out.

[Tripredacus]

If you really want to do a recovery on the system, we can probably ignore the SVCHOST issue.

You are getting the STOP 0x7B with an XP CD via a USB CD-ROM because the USB driver is not in the XP CD. Because you can boot OPHCrack doesn't help (other than it means you have a usable drive) because that OS (Linux) either has the driver for the USB in it or doesn't try to use it the same was the XP disc does.

You have two options. You can learn to slipstream the USB drivers into your XP MCE CD, but you will need to have a working CD writer. The other option is you can build an XP install on a USB Key.

So for the moment, I'll put this topic in XP Unattend section.