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Baa?21242 Posts
-tear-
I have a Dell 1500 Vostro, about a year and a half old, that has been performing marvelously for that time period, and two days ago, on start-up, it decided to randomly crash, which makes me really sad. I've tried a variety of fixes, none of which have worked. Maybe someone on TL experienced this too and can help me out...
The crash:
After booting up normally, the login screen and everything works fine. I log in, and it loads all of my start-up programs fine. However, it gives me about 30 seconds after it finishes loading everything to freeze. Faster if I decide to click on something before that.
The screen doesn't go dark or anything, it just freezes as is. Ctrl + Alt + Dlt and such don't work, and the only thing I can do is just hold down the power button and turn off my laptop like that.
Upon reboot, it repeats this if I choose normal mode, but if I choose Safe Mode, it works fine. In Safe Mode, I disabled all of my start-up programs to no avail. Did a few virus/adware/spyware/etc. scans, cleared some junk out, deleted some stuff to free up hard-drive space. Again, no avail. I tried a system restore, and also Vista's start-up repair. None of that helps, the problem persists.
I haven't done anything with my computer lately, didn't install any new software or hardware. Searching around online, it seems that this could be caused by a variety of things, none of which seems to fit my problem, seeing as I haven't done anything with my computer that's out of the ordinary, but it randomly decided to die on me.
Thoughts? Suggestions? I really don't want to reformat my computer seeing as there's a lot of stuff on it D=
PS Using other people's computers sucks. T_T
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well which virus/adware/spyware software did you use?
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Baa?21242 Posts
Pretty standard stuff, AdAware, Spybot, AVG, and Norton.
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Just use an external hard drive to backup everything in safe mode. And do a reformat. Start off fresh. Why not?
If you must not, check to make sure the laptop isn't overheating and is shutting down as a precaution measure.
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Try spyhunter? It usually finds what other scanner's cant sometimes
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ComboFix too.
You can also try turning off some Services, maybe one of them makes it freeze.
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did you try downloading some ram?
Edit: Actually I wouldn't really know what to do besides what these guys already said.
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United States24497 Posts
On March 06 2009 09:57 Kennelie wrote:
did you try downloading some ram?
Did you try going to www.disney.com ?
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Baa?21242 Posts
I'll look into some of these programs suggested, but I'm not placing too much hope in them. I've basically tried everything I can do that's software related without completely resetting my computer.
I don't think it's a hardware issue, since Safe Mode runs fine. From what I've seen and what I've read online, I'm tempted to think that Vista compatibility issues are the culprit, but I'm not sure. Bah.
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On March 06 2009 09:31 demo1 wrote:
Just use an external hard drive to backup everything in safe mode. And do a reformat. Start off fresh. Why not?
If you must not, check to make sure the laptop isn't overheating and is shutting down as a precaution measure.
Best idea.
Along with running those spyware programs, did the computer behave weird before the whole freezing thing occurred?
ie Popups on desktop, icons wouldn't load, toolbar dissappeard, etc.
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Hey, I've got that same laptop and have been using it for about 2 years!
Uh. Just felt like saying that.
About your problem. Well it looks like its all software side so you'll be fine. Try using the system restore tool, or reinstalling windows, or in the worst case scenario, backup all your personal data and format!
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A homemade trojan (made well) can do some serious damage and still not be picked up by commercial software. Ex. A while back I new a bunch of people who got infected by a trojan that just re-started your computer every time you boot it up, like.. almost immediately, and they were all fucked.
As for you, I don't know much about Vista besides the fact that it's ridden with problems, but if your hardware's fine I can't think of any other likely explanation. Solution? Back-up, reformat. It really doesn't take as long as you might think, but the purchase of an external HDD might hurt a bit.
As a last resort I might recommend running Malwarebyte's Anti-Malware and uninstalling anything that you've installed or that has an impact on your registry in the past few weeks. Who knows, maybe you'll get lucky xD
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what you can do is buy one of these adapters, http://www.bay-wolf.com/hddadapter.htm (they are relatively cheap). Just take out the hdd from the laptop, connect it to the desktop your using and back up all the data you need to keep. Then reformat the hdd and reinstall windows and reload all your data back on. That would prob be the easiest way of going about it if you cant get the antispyware and whatnot to work.
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On March 06 2009 13:39 dm47 wrote:
Ex. A while back I new a bunch of people who got infected by a trojan that just re-started your computer every time you boot it up, like.. almost immediately, and they were all fucked.
are you sure it was a trojan? are you sure it wasn't some jackass who put the shortcut to %windir%\system32\shutdown.exe -r -t 00 in their startup folder?
best prank ever.
oh and
On March 06 2009 13:39 dm47 wrote:As for you, I don't know much about Vista besides the fact that it's ridden with problems, but if your hardware's fine I can't think of any other likely explanation.
word of mouth sure is a powerful thing.. microsoft should take note, although win7 seems to have good rap so far. anyway, vista is a good operating system.
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EPT
