HP Media Center PC DEAD! HELP!

[BlackMKIII]

My mother-in-law (bless her heart) owns a 2003 HP Media Center PC. It has a Pentium 4 HT CPU, 1GB of Ram, and running XP Media Center with SP2. She's been running IE 6 for a while, and last night it wouldn't load any webpages. She turned it off and restarted, to no avail.

This morning I cleared out a ton of spyware, temp files, etc. No help. I upgraded to IE 7 and restarted. Now Windows Explorer won't open, and NOTHING WORKS. WTF?

Anyone know what might be going on here? :1zhelp:

 

[ArthurRitus]

Unless she has stuff she desp needs to keep. My answer to all problems: Reformat and reinstall. Takes bout 50 mins and its refreshing to have a like new OS again. For instructions, just google it, the info is easy to get


EDIT: Make sure you have the windows cd + key before deleting your hard drive and stuff

 

[Fuzz420]

its a hp, run system restore

 

[BlackMKIII]

She's a professor at CSU East Bay. All her course data in on that PC. She has backups, but it'll be a PITA to do.

Fuzz: It won't even load Windows Explorer. And We don't know when the last restore point was set. :/

 

[foreverpsycotic]

boot into safe mode and run MSCONFIG. look for any files that are not neccessary, or any viruses. if you are questioning an image, search it on google. also look for NPAD, its a nasty virus that tries to emulate notepad.

edit: also might want to run chkdisk from any xp install cd

 

[BlackMKIII]

Well, I've figured out that Windows Explorer is corrupted.

I've installed a newer copy of Explorer from my computer to her external hard drive and am using it that way.

I told her and Elizabeth to get whatever they need off the C: drive onto the external one so I can wipe it. Problem (sort of) solved!

 

[foreverpsycotic]

ide run chkdisk before reinstalling

 

[BlackMKIII]

Looks like kernel32.dll and a couple others are corrupt too. Grrrrr......

 

[Poodles]

bingo... nasty virus

DON'T RUN IE

Runs something like Avant, Maxthon, Firefox, ect... IE gets hacked, it ruins windows explorer (since they're linked, dumb fucking move M$)

 

[BlackMKIII]

Good thing I still remember my DOS programming.

 

[BlackMKIII]

My ultimate solution: Remove her hard drive and install it as a slave in mine. Now I have a total of 4 hard drives on my PC. Wheeeee.......

Let the file copying begin.

 

[foreverpsycotic]

when you are done with the restore, create a ghost image of her drive, it will make things faster in the long run. At my school, we have ghost images of all lab machines and pre imaged drives for the laptops we support., makes for faster file transfering.

 

[iwannadie]

Ask her why shes going to so many porn sites.