Help or tips please, laptop issues.

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marmel

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#74751 6-Jan-2011 18:23

Had my hp laptop for almost a year, purchased it new.

Today I uninstalled some programs I no longer use, nothing major just things like DVD ripping software, nokia pc suite etc.

After that I used ccleaner to tidy up the hard drive and registry.

I have used cleaner for years and never had any problems.

Anyway I tried to restart and laptop comes to user select screen and crashes. Shows a blus screen with a heap of writing, then restarts after about 5 seconds.

I have tried starting in safe mode and restoring to a recovery point from yesterday, both ended up with the same blue screen although the restore itself seemed to go ok.

I am now doing a memory check but it is 70% through and found no issues yet.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

mckenndk

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#424748 6-Jan-2011 18:45

Are you able to find out what the BSOD error is? mobile phone cameras usually do a good job to find out what they are.
This will help to identifiy what it is if you can get it.

other option would be to try and run a repair from your windows disk (not one that will wipe your pc).

Dion

marmel

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#424750 6-Jan-2011 18:50

Ok can't seem to get to the blue screen anymore. I just get the arrow cursor and that is it. I am thinking some kind of hardware failure?

mckenndk

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#424751 6-Jan-2011 18:54

Do you have the windows disks to be able to boot into safe mode?

You can run a chkdsk and see if that cleans it up if you can.

Otherwise you can choose the repair windows option.

Dion

marmel

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#424760 6-Jan-2011 19:28

I don't have discs, there is a recovery partition on the drive. I have tried the recovery manager and ran the startup diagnosis, doesn't find any faults.

Still stuck at the moment before I get to the user login, just have a blank screen with arrow cursor.

marmel

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#425128 8-Jan-2011 09:52

An update for anyone that finds themselves in a similar situation:

I used the bios to check the hard drive, no faults found. This pointed to a software fault. Given that system restore wouldn't fix the issue the fault was in the core OS so it had to be re-installed.

I pulled the hard drive and put it into an external USB case, copied off what I needed and then put it back into the laptop. Using the recovery partition I re-installed the OS, all appears to be fine now.

Not sure what went wrong but this is the first time I have had a major computer failure in the last 20 years so can't really complain.

Shoes2468

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#425144 8-Jan-2011 10:50

Hi

I was thinking maybe something went wrong in the registry when running cCleaner just at a guess.

marmel

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#425145 8-Jan-2011 10:51

Yeah but then you would think a system restore to an earlier point may have corrected that but it didn't.

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gzt

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#427585 16-Jan-2011 11:18

Guessing for entertainment purposes only = ; ) a display device driver can give this kind of BSOD behaviour. Driver update recently, or windows update just happily installed a driver not actually suited to your display hardware. BSOD on restart. After booting the last good configuration, the blank screen with arrow cursor sounds like a hardware detection process gone wrong/hung up on the reboot. Normally at that point you would be able to reboot safe mode and remove the bad drivers from device manager, and maybe install the original drivers.

There is a related condition where windows will detect and install the bad drivers again on the next reboot, but that's another fix story.

You could also boot with logging at this point and look at the log after to see what is going on. Or choose manual loading and yes/no every step. If the 'yes' fails, try a 'no' next time.

Could have been physical hardware failure but most commonly a driver problem.

This link is for NT4 but will give you some idea about BSOD diagnosis if it happens again:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc750081.aspx

Disrespective

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#427758 16-Jan-2011 20:28

If you have the cursor up on its own you can access things by pressing shift more than 6 times in a row. This brings up a prompt which you can use to get access to the hdd and navigate to the explorer.exe to restart the desktop.

You can then try and make a new user account or fix your current one with the help of google (I'm afraid i'm not much help myself)

b0untypure1

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#429370 20-Jan-2011 22:09

marmel: Yeah but then you would think a system restore to an earlier point may have corrected that but it didn't.

yea , even the registry cleaners that make backups, are of no use, because if you bsod and cant get into windows, what use is the reg backup sitting on, just say, your desktop

Nety

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#429420 21-Jan-2011 06:15

I just fixed a family members PC which was hanging with blank desktop and mouse pointer. Turned out they had two anti-virus programs installed which were fighting. Uninstalled and back to normal (switched them to Microsoft Security Essentials). Found it my loading safe mode and using msconfig to disable all apps that were starting on bootup.

Media centre PC - Case Silverstone LC16M with 2 X 80mm AcoustiFan DustPROOF, MOBO Gigabyte MA785GT-UD3H, CPU AMD X2 240 under volted, RAM 4 Gig DDR3 1033, HDD 120Gig System/512Gig data, Tuners 2 X Hauppauge HVR-3000, 1 X HVR-2200, Video Palit GT 220, Sound Realtek 886A HD (onboard), Optical LiteOn DH-401S Blue-ray using TotalMedia Theatre Power Corsair VX Series, 450W ATX PSU OS Windows 7 x64