Help me!!!

[One Question]

Okay, so I just drove for 6 hours to visit my parents for the holiday, and when I pulled my laptop out, there were some major problems.

First of all, the interface (stuff like taskbar, start button, etc) won't load. Second of all, its running incredibly slow.

I was able to get some screen shots to show you what I mean, however, I normally use photoshop to do all my image editing and saving, but in the state my computer was in, opening photoshop was out of the question. So, I had to save the images in word documents and then transfer them on a jump drive to my parents' computer which is a piece of crap and doesn't have any image editing software or anything, so the files are still word documents... I've uploaded them. Here they are:

http://helpme427.tripod.com/helpme.doc
http://helpme427.tripod.com/helpme2.doc
http://helpme427.tripod.com/helpme3.doc

Any ideas? Thanks a lot!

[JeppZer]

... I'm not clicking those weird ass links
To me it sounds like when my computer gets overheated.. I just solve it by opening a window, but you.. perhaps a fried gfx card?

[Negative Polarity]

JeppZer has a point. It seems that your sole purpose for joining these boards was to ask this single question, am I right? Your credibility leaves something to be desired. Hmm, explorer not starting when when Windows starts and very slow. If any components were fried, Windows would probably tell you in the manner of a BSOD. Almost sounds like a spyware infection to me. Can you give us any more information than some document files that most people don't want to touch for various reasons? Have you tried uploading the screenshots to an image server and posting them here? Do you have any odd programs running in your task manager?

[chapium]

Use mspaint to send some screenies. No need for photoshop.

[Deacon]

Why the HELL do people think Word is what they should use for posting screenshots? Have they never heard of MS Paint? This guy is either a doofus or a malware perpetrator.

[chapium]

Anyhow, I'm brave. My virus scanner detected nothing and upon opening openoffice.org here's what i can say:

Something is definately corrupted. The two thing I woulld try is to 1) create a new user account and see if you see the same thing (which you probably will).

2) Pop in you windows xp disk and do a detect and repair.

If its still broke after that, it would probably be easiest just to reinstall windows.

[One Question]

Thanks for the advice chapium! I'll try that out. Unfortunately my Windows CD's are 500 miles away.

Maybe there's some around here...

Anyway, for everyone too scared to look at the .doc files, I took your advice on the MS Paint thing. Then I posted the images on photobucket because that's probably less scary than tripod, right? I didn't think about that earlier. Sorry. Unfortunately, the quality of paint leaves much to be desired. You can _probably_ see what's going on with just these jpg files:





Let me note that the poor color quality (low number of colors) that you see in these pictures is not a problem that my computer is having, but rather a problem with MS Paint...

If you need better quality image, look at the .doc files (sorry about the scare, but you could always virus check, right?)




EDIT: Holy crap! Chapium! Creating a new user account worked! . . . Now how do I fix the original account???

[workmad3]

If new user account worked, I would suggest deleting the old one and scouring it from your computer. Something has gone seriously wrong with it, most likely in the user initialisation files or the windows registry entries associated with it. Those things are pretty much a nightmare to fix, especially if you don't know where to look to start with, and are also not the kind of thing that you want to be talking someone through on forums.

Also, what did you do to the poor screenshots in paint? Never had that problem with paint before. You didnt do anything weird like save them as 8bit bitmaps before converting to jpg did you?

[Martin Blank]

Be careful with deleting the account, because if you're not careful you can also delete all the data that goes with it.

As far as fixing the original account, look for things (logged in as that account) that may be loading and interfering. First way to do this is to login in Safe Mode (press F8 while Windows is just starting to get that menu) and see if it looks more or less right. If it is, load msconfig and see what's loading, disable odd things, and reboot into normal mode. You can then add back things that may look OK until you find what's b0rk3d.

[One Question]

Okay. Now if for some reason I do end up needing to delete the old account, would there be a way to get into all the "My Documents" stuff and such? If I try to look at that stuff from the new account, it gives me an "access denied" warning...

Also, as far as going into safe mode, I tried that earlier, but I'm not sure if it's because of the brand of the computer or what, but when I push F8 during the boot-up time, it flashes something at me on the DOS screen that is way too fast for me to read and then goes into Windows as normal... I can get into the BIOS, but that doesn't really help, does it?

[Long Quan]

Oh and uhh, by the way, I remembered my username and password from when I was on the forums ages ago, so maybe that will add some credibility to my question?

Sorry if I came off as an idiot or a malware perpetrator. I kind of expected that kind of response when posting .doc files, but thanks to the people who have been helpful so far!

(p.s. so, if you didn't catch my drift, I am the same person as "One Question")

[Negative Polarity]

Well, why didn't you say so in the first place? Welcome back!

[Long Quan]

[quote="Negative Polarity";p="575259"]Well, why didn't you say so in the first place? Welcome back![/quote]

Thanks!

Haha, I probably should have said something... Judging by your join date, I had already been long inactive when you came on the forums though.

[peter-griffin]

lame, was an awesome gimmick. too bad it's all over now.

[OniNeko]

Mind if I add instructions for screenshots?

No? too bad.

hit Print Screen
Start->Run->mspaint->Enter/OK
Image->Attributes->Height/Width 10x10 pixels->OK
CTRL+V (Paint will resize image to desktop resolution, e.g. 1280x1024)
File->Save as...->Name it->Save As Type->GIF (*.GIF)->Save button
Click yes when it says you will lose color information.
upload to photobucket or image hosting of your choice.


Some will argue that JPG gives better compression for large images, and they'd be correct. A quick test on 1280x1024 screenshots yields 50k smaller size on JPG vs GIF

.JPG 120KB
.GIF 176KB
.PNG 197KB
.BMP 3,841KB
.DOC 302KB