hello everyone. heres my problem im trying to fix a pc for a friend of mine. okay as far as i can tell from what he told me. he has no start menu icon/tray and absolutely everything on his desktop is gone. ive given him some pointers until i can pick up the pc. so to get a head start what anyone here suggest?
The OS question is certainly important. Is he getting the blue screen of death or not?. Could be that his boot files got corrupted. Did he delete any programs/files just before this happened or is the HDD making any unusual noises. Ask him to restart and see if he can boot in Safe Mode or not. Keep us posted.
lol my bad. I didnt even post the basics. uhh hes running windows xp home edition ( no idea what service pack ) he said no blue screen of death and no weird noises. Its a dell ( i dont know the model name for certain but its the real cheap one). he can do a safe boot as far as i know. hes been trying to fix it himself with no luck. so i told him to contact Dell and get a restore disc. which he never got. but they were gonna make him pay for it and his familys kinda tight on money so that was a no go. well ill try to reply to any new posts as soon as possible. thanks.
once you log into windows normaly bring up task manager(ctrl+alt+del), then click file, new task and type explorer.exe,only do that is there is no explorer.exe in the running proceses. it looks like the explorer.exe was deleted, without this process you wont see anything. post back, btw doing this will only get up explorer.exe till the next reboot then youll have to do it aggain..if this is the case then just download explorer.exe.
Okay ill try and pass that on. yeah we finally got arrangements and ill be picking the pc up this friday (1/20/05). Thanks any more ideas? Now would the explorer.exe be from a spyware/virus infection or can is that strictly user error?
well thanks everyone i think that was it i told my friend to do a new task and start "explorer.exe" and he said windows can not find it. so im trying to find it on the web and if not ill probably reformat it.
Just copy it off ya windows installation disk and copy it into your windows folder. C:/windows. You may have to do this in safe mode, but I doubt it. Then reboot. Then check viruses cause a virus probaly ate it or the virus cleaning software.:>
that explains why you cant see anythign its been deleted as i said i'll include a link for you to download it in this post once i find it. yeh its probaly a virus or somthing similar thats deleted it but its not hard to fix.
Well thanks for the help everyone but I got it up and running. Heres the jist of how it went. Whatever spyware/virus that got onto his pc denied access to anything and basically set itself as the Administrator. So I put the Windows Disc in to reinstall except the spyware/virus restricted me from installing software. So i booted into safe mode. I was then able to re-install windows. After reinstalling I made one account for myself with full administrator privileges. I then proceeded to manually clean the entire pc out. Their was still things left over from the last install ( mainly the old log-in accounts and everything in them) so i removed them. I also installed many apps for him, including Ad-Aware, Spybot S&D, ZoneAlarm, AVG Free, and Spyware Doctor. Spyware Doctor found a program that had downloaded nearly 80 pornography movies and was using his pc as a server. I had to manually remove that garbage. But its all working now thanks for the help - PeaInAPod
hey glad to hear its sorted.. god damm it youve got to be jokin 80 porno films and was using his pc as a server, lol i cant believe stuff like that happnens sometimes.
Yep well i just got back from hooking it up at his place. And no matter what i did, no matter what drivers I updated, his LAN wouldn't work. So I told him his best bet would be to call Comcast in the Morning. Thanks for the help everyone. - Chris
Just a guick update he contacted dell and whoever he got forwarded too didnt understand his problem. so he called comcast. they came out and fixed it all up for him (free of charge!!) peace out - chris
80 p0rn movies????? he must have a large HDD.... that's gotta be at least 100GB of p0rn alone, possibly as much as 200GB. pssst, any worth trading. LOL
