A plethora of problems

[jon112981]

Okay so the girls across the street asked me to take a look at one of their computers. I encountered several problems with it and was wondering if anyone has seen or heard of these before and has a solution OTHER than formatting and re-installing windows.

1) In Internet Explorer and field where you can enter in text (eg the seach pages) does not work. The cursor changes to the vertical bar but you can't click on it nor can you type anything in. I have yet to try a non-IE browser. That is my task for tomorrow, but IE should work anyway.

2) Norton Anti-Virus cannot be opened, run, or uninstalled. No matter what I try to do with it, windows stops resonding all together. I think something got corrupted in the installation of the program(or perhaps there is a virus on the computer).

3) I wanted to attempt to back up any data on that computer so I installed Nero to burn that to cds. Nero doesn't recognize the driver as a burner. Windows reports it as a CD-R/W. I confirmed that it is indeed an R/W, infact it's a Lite on. When I select recorder in Nero all I get is the option to burn an image. I've never had any problem with Nero not picking up a drive before, usually it just picked up mine right away. Is there anything that I am just missing?

Thanks for your help.

JON

[dafanman]

jon112981
My take on it,
If time is money and or the time spent troubleshooting the various issues severly outweigh the benefits of a fresh format and install, I go with the fresh format every time, I make the user responsible for the preservation of their data, if its not backed up and they want to try and recover, then its gonna cost.

My first suspicion is virus infection. At the very least severe windows corruption, which again is it worth it to try and repair it, and then can you really be sure?

Concerning the norton issue, allmost a sure sign of problems, you might at the very least, pull the drive to another computer, scan it for infection, and then proceed from there with any data recovery efforts.

Just my 2

[RicheemxX]

quick easy approach that is if you ahve a small HDD laying around. Take it over with you with win98 or something installed as well as whatever virus detection you preffer. Install you hdd in master and boot from it scan their hdd to see if there is actual infection and if so how bad. If back-up is needed do it either to your hdd or to the cdrw then do a fresh formatt and install for them

quick painless and easy

[JPMiller]

RicheemxX is correct but one issue may be that you are trying to attach a windows installed from a different machine to boot from...that may be tricky and time consuming... If you have a good antivirus program that is up to date, and an OS that is compatible with her file system...(i.e. windows using Fat32 with a windows using Fat 32 or NTFS with NTFS) then you can slave her drive to that computer, scan it with antivirus, spybot, adaware, or any combination thereof.
once that is done I highly recomend running a reg cleaning tool such as RegClean, and doing a repair of Internet Explorer.
As far as the CDRW is concerned...make sure that no Roxio easy cd creator version is already installed as that will cause problems with any other cd burning app you try to install.

[PyroSama]

Also adaware and spybot might be handy.


Go to antivirus.com they have a free online scanner you can run first and follow up with NAV


PyroSama

[Bill in SD, CA]

Maybe this will help:

Cannot Type Text in Outlook Express or Internet Explorer

Bill

[Bovon]

Although Bill in SD, CA's suggestion is a very good possibility, I am leaning towards a virus. Since NAV will not load, is why I suspect a virus. Many (most...all??) current virii written in the recent past will disable any antivirus applications the machine has installed.

The reason Nero does not see the burner as a CDRW may be because that version of Nero came bundled with a different burner. The serial key issued with Nero when bundled with any particular make/model of burner will only work with that specific one. The Nero application is a full version, and if a new serial key registration is purchased from Ahead, Nero will then work with any burner.

[wju425]

If you use a hard drive loaded with the os and necessary files to work on computers be sure you have your windows cd or have the cab files installed on the hard drive (preferred). When you hook up to different mobos windows will detect the mobo and will be looking for the cab files. I found that out the hard way.

\o/ Billy

By the way, I made such a drive (1.2gig) with win98se and lots of tools. I take it with me on calls along with a data cable and power wire splitter. A very handy tool.

[mr.jiggyfly]

Or rather just simply use that small hardrive to backup important documents as a slave drive, and reinstall windows in primary drive.

Merry Xmas to all.

[Bovon]

Originally posted by wju425

By the way, I made such a drive (1.2gig) with win98se and lots of tools. I take it with me on calls along with a data cable and power wire splitter. A very handy tool.

Dang good idea...and will be way up on my list of projects to do list.

Thanks!