MELISSA said:
I KEEP GETTING A MESSAGE THAT READS AS FOLLOWS:
FILES THAT ARE REQUIRED FOR WINDOWS TO RUN PROPERLY HAVE
BEEN REPLACED BY UNRECOGNIZED VERSIONS. TO MAINTAIN
SYSTEM STABILITY, WINDOWS MUST RESTORE THE ORIGINAL
VERSIONS OF THESE FILES. IT THEN INSTRUCTS ME TO INSERT
MY WIN XP PRO SERVICE PACK 1 CD, WHICH I DON'T HAVE AS I
PURCHASED MY COMPUTER WITH WIN.XP PRO ALREADY INSTALLED
ON IT.SO, AS IF IT ISN'T ALREADY OBVIOUS, MY QUESTION IS
HOW DO I GO ABOUT REPAIRING THIS PROBLEM?THANK YOU IN
ADVANCE, FOR YOUR TIME AND PLEASE HELP ME FIGURE THIS OUT.
MUCH THANKS,
MELISSA
1) Buy a non-broken keyboard or please learn to use lower-case letters. All
caps are considered the same as someone ALWAYS SCREAMING AT YOU!
2) Sounds like you have a virus/trojan/spyware/adware/malware. Clean up the
machine before worrying too much about having the CD. See below #3 for
help...
3) You should have gotten SOME way to re-install your system. If you did
not - contact those that sold you the computer, they are your Microsoft
support and should tell you how you would restore your computer should
something catastrophic happen. If they do not, you CAN report them to
Microsoft.
Here is more information on how to cleanup your PC of some of the bad things
that may have gotten installed...
Turn on that firewall...
http://www.microsoft.com/WindowsXP/home/using/howto/homenet/icf.asp
If you are getting "Messenger Service" popups - this will also remedy those.
(If you have AOL, you will have to get a third party firewall. IMHO -
another reason NOT to use AOL. Although, I suggest highly that if you want
to get better protection, you should get a third party Firewall anyway, it
still does nothing for my AOL dislike.)
Make sure you have all the updates (critical) installed from:
http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/
(Scan for updates, Review and Install)
Get rid of the spy/ad/mal-ware..
(Yes - using MORE than one of these.. I recommend at least the first
three.)
Spybot Search and Destroy
http://www.safer-networking.org/
Lavasoft AdAware
http://www.lavasoft.de
Hijack This!
(For browser Hijacks - also look into CWS Shredder)
http://mjc1.com/mirror/hjt/
And Assortment of Others:
http://www.merijn.org/downloads.html
After you cleanup your PC somewhat of spy/ad/mal-ware, verify your antivirus
software is updated and run a full scan of your computer. If you have no
antivirus software - get one NOW!
http://www.grisoft.com/us/us_dwnl_free.php
Empty your Temporary Internet Files and shrink the size it stores to about
80-120MB..
- Open ONE copy of Internet Explorer.
- Select TOOLS -> Internet Options.
- Under the General tab in the "Temporary Internet Files" section, do the
following:
- Click on "Delete Cookies" (click OK)
- Click on "Settings" and change the "Amount of disk space to use:" to
something between 80MB and 120MB. (Betting it is MUCH larger right now.)
- Click OK.
- Click on "Delete Files" and select to "Delete all offline contents"
(the checkbox) and click OK. (If you had a LOT, this could take 2-10 minutes
or more.)
- Once it is done, click OK, close Internet Explorer, re-open Internet
Explorer.
Uninstall any software you do not use often/ever. (If you have something
installed but never use it, uninstall it. If you go through Control
Panel -> Add/Remove Programs and see things you seldom if ever use, it is to
your advantage to remove it.)
Update all of your hardware drivers (find the manufacturers of your video
card, motherboard, sound card, modem, network card and so on - go to their
web pages, look for Windows XP drivers there and download/install the newest
ones.)
