Dylan's in trouble...

[jadecat]

Dylan, for those not in the know- is my home laptop computer. Dylan has decided that he no longer wishes to fully boot up in 'normal' mode. He will still boot up, eventually, in Safe Mode. It just takes for-freaking-ever!

I quizzed one of our techs here- and he suggested checking a couple places (msconfig, run a defrag in Safe Mode, etc). So we do those things- the msconfig did have a weird entry, we got rid of that, but it didn't help. Tried running the defrag, Dylan thought about it for awhile, started the defrag process, and then went to a black screen...

We have TrendMicro for antivirus, spyware, malware, greyware, etc. It updates every 12 hours or so. So I'm not too concerned about a virus. And we can't run a scan while in Safe Mode anyway... why is that? Anywho, I also checked (because hubby did a Windows Update a few days ago) but the update KB17013(puts the Windows Desktop Search on your computer) wasn't included at the time. So that wasn't the issue.

Hubby still thinks it might be a virus. I think it's the hard drive (it'll spin for a few, stuff happens, then it stops.... then spins up again and more stuff happens (i.e. when starting up it'll put the placeholder icons on the screen, and then slowly replace those with the 'real' icons).

Opinions?

(Oh, and we did get the extended warranty from Circuit City, so if it's the hard drive we shouldn't be out much. :) Although... the October payment on the Circuit City credit card - that we used to buy Dylan- saw it's final payment this month... so the month Dylan is officially paid for, he goes on strike. They raised our limit on the card this month too. I threatened Dylan saying that if he didn't straighten up and boot right I'd replace him... Maybe I would name that one Brandon. *thinks* )


(PS- this also explains why I wasn't on Yahoo Messenger last night to word war with my DIPPY peeps. Adding to the annoyance as I wanted to be there!)

Comments

[jadecat.livejournal.com]

We're running XP Home currently. I'm thinking the hard drive is dying- hence running slowly- but not dead yet. So it hasn't failed, but could soon.

Problem in part, we can't run a virus check. Since it won't boot up as anything but Safe Mode- and that doesn't seem to allow scans.

Will try to do another Win Update and see what happens.

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

Since I mostly do Unix and Mac OSX, I don't know XP in depth, but does it have a way to roll back updates? Uninstall them? That's something I'd try first.

[jadecat.livejournal.com]

Steve said he tried that... but I'm not sure what date he went back to. I'll have to try it myself (he's not the most gifted when it comes to computers. ;) ). Thanks for the ideas.