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Hey everyone,
I've got a little bit of a brainbuster for everyone. It
has to do with my girlfriend's computer which has
recently started acting really wierd... I'm in a bit of a
bind since I'm in Toronto until the end of April and
she's back in Vancouver (for all of you who have
forgotten your elementary school geography, it's
basically like New York to L.A) and she's not all that
computer literate.
Computer:
AMD Athlon 1333 MHz
384 MB PC2100 DDR RAM
40 GB HD
CD-RW
Built in audio, video, and networking.
The computer has run just fine for the past 8 months on
XP (it had ME on it before, formatted the drive, did a
clean install).
Here are the syptoms:
The computer starts up just fine and loads into windows
normally. Norton Internet Security updates have been
completed daily and the Norton Anti-virus scanner scans
the hard drive every 3 days (I know this because I set it
up). The scan on Monday (Mar 22) came up as nil. Adaware
scans have also been run on a regular basis (about once a
week).
As of Tuesday (Mar 23), the computer would stop
responding after about 5 minutes. The screen went blank
and the power light on the monitor turned orange (like it
does when there's no signal or the computer is in
standby). The computer is still on (i.e. there is power
and the fans are going), but there is no response. To
check that it wasn't just the video that was cutting out,
I asked her to unplug a usb device after the screen had
shut off to see if Windows would detect the removed
hardware (the classic "ding-dong" when you remove USB
hardware). There was no sound on the speakers.
I asked her to reboot and boot into safe mode with
networking. When she was in, I sent her the FixBlast.exe
(Blaster worm removal tool) from Symantec and told her to
run that. The computer cut out while the scan was
running.
Now here's the part that really has me boggled. I asked
her to hit Ctrl+Alt+Del to open up the task manager. When
it came up, she told me that all she saw was the stuff
that normally appears under the "Applications" tab (i.e.
Task, Status, End Task, Switch To, New Task). In the
title bar, there was no "Windows Task Manager" and no
caption buttons, only the little computer icon. There
were no menus and no tabs. The only way for her to close
the taks manager after that was to right click on the
icon in the system tray and select "Close".
Now... what in the world has gone wrong here? I am
completely stumped...
I'm guessing (and dreading) that it will require a clean
install of WinXP to fix this. Like I said, she's not
exactly computer literate, so it's sometimes hard to
explain to her what to do and what things are where (i.e.
I had to tell her that the system tray was beside the
clock, etc).
Does anyone have any suggestions? Please remember that
I've got to explain this over the phone to her, so no big
complicated procedures.
Thanks for all the help in advance.
Nick
(e-mail address removed)
I've got a little bit of a brainbuster for everyone. It
has to do with my girlfriend's computer which has
recently started acting really wierd... I'm in a bit of a
bind since I'm in Toronto until the end of April and
she's back in Vancouver (for all of you who have
forgotten your elementary school geography, it's
basically like New York to L.A) and she's not all that
computer literate.
Computer:
AMD Athlon 1333 MHz
384 MB PC2100 DDR RAM
40 GB HD
CD-RW
Built in audio, video, and networking.
The computer has run just fine for the past 8 months on
XP (it had ME on it before, formatted the drive, did a
clean install).
Here are the syptoms:
The computer starts up just fine and loads into windows
normally. Norton Internet Security updates have been
completed daily and the Norton Anti-virus scanner scans
the hard drive every 3 days (I know this because I set it
up). The scan on Monday (Mar 22) came up as nil. Adaware
scans have also been run on a regular basis (about once a
week).
As of Tuesday (Mar 23), the computer would stop
responding after about 5 minutes. The screen went blank
and the power light on the monitor turned orange (like it
does when there's no signal or the computer is in
standby). The computer is still on (i.e. there is power
and the fans are going), but there is no response. To
check that it wasn't just the video that was cutting out,
I asked her to unplug a usb device after the screen had
shut off to see if Windows would detect the removed
hardware (the classic "ding-dong" when you remove USB
hardware). There was no sound on the speakers.
I asked her to reboot and boot into safe mode with
networking. When she was in, I sent her the FixBlast.exe
(Blaster worm removal tool) from Symantec and told her to
run that. The computer cut out while the scan was
running.
Now here's the part that really has me boggled. I asked
her to hit Ctrl+Alt+Del to open up the task manager. When
it came up, she told me that all she saw was the stuff
that normally appears under the "Applications" tab (i.e.
Task, Status, End Task, Switch To, New Task). In the
title bar, there was no "Windows Task Manager" and no
caption buttons, only the little computer icon. There
were no menus and no tabs. The only way for her to close
the taks manager after that was to right click on the
icon in the system tray and select "Close".
Now... what in the world has gone wrong here? I am
completely stumped...
I'm guessing (and dreading) that it will require a clean
install of WinXP to fix this. Like I said, she's not
exactly computer literate, so it's sometimes hard to
explain to her what to do and what things are where (i.e.
I had to tell her that the system tray was beside the
clock, etc).
Does anyone have any suggestions? Please remember that
I've got to explain this over the phone to her, so no big
complicated procedures.
Thanks for all the help in advance.
Nick
(e-mail address removed)