a pop up accures when signing on stating missing or changed windows files,
insert windows XP CD. My computer, from gateway , does not have a windowsXP
disk. It came with a recovery disk which I think is not the same as a XP sp2
disk. I am hesitant to use the recovery disk. Any suggestions would be
appreciated.
I would not put in the Gateway CD either - until some other things are
checked first and we know what the message says for sure.
Do you have or can you get a copy of a genuine bootable XP
installation CD in case you need one?
Try to type in the exact error message as best you can.
Perform some scans for malicious software, then fix any remaining
issues:
Download, install, update and do a full scan with these free malware
detection programs:
Malwarebytes (MBAM):
http://malwarebytes.org/
SUPERAntiSpyware: (SAS):
http://www.superantispyware.com/
They can be uninstalled later if desired.
To eliminate questions and guessing, please provide additional
information about your system.
Click Start, Run and in the box enter:
msinfo32
Click OK, and when the System Summary info appears, click Edit, Select
All, Copy and then paste the information back here.
There will be some personal information (like System Name and User
Name), and whatever appears to be private information to you, just
delete it from the pasted information.
Look in the Event Viewer for clues around the time of the incident
Here is a method to post the specific information about individual
events.
To see the Event Viewer logs, click Start, Settings, Control Panel,
Administrative Tools, Event Viewer.
A shortcut to Event Viewer is to click Start, Run and in the box
enter:
%SystemRoot%\system32\eventvwr.msc /s
Click OK to launch the Event Viewer.
The most interesting logs are usually the Application and System.
Some logs may be almost or completely empty.
Not every event is a problem, some are informational messages that
things are working okay and some are warnings.
No event should defy reasonable explanation.
Each event is sorted by Date and Time. Errors will have red Xs,
Warnings will have yellow !s.
Information messages have white is. Not every Error or Warning event
means there is a serious issue.
Some are excusable at startup time when Windows is booting. Try to
find just the events at the date
and time around your problem.
If you double click an event, it will open a Properties windows with
more information. On the right are
black up and down arrow buttons to scroll through the open events. The
third button that looks like
two pages on top of each other is used to copy the event details to
your Windows clipboard.
When you find an interesting event that occurred around the time of
your issue, click the third button
under the up and down arrows to copy the details and then you can
paste the details (right click, Paste
or CTRL-V) the detail text back here for analysis.
To get a fresh start on any Event Viewer log, you can choose to clear
the log (backing up the log is offered),
then reproduce your issue, then look at just the events around the
time of your issue.
