Need computer help

[eaterbooger]

Nancy,
Sure I can stick around. I came in looking for some resources on autism. Right now I am at a point that I feel my son could get better services and just scouting for info. I have been doing alot of reading in here and have got some good info. Alot of people seem to know thier stuff here! I should post my situation but its long and drawn out. I came across this thread and thought I could help as her situation sounded familar to me.
I know what your saying about talking to people in India! I am an XM radio subscriber and let me tell you they are the worse. I usually end up asking for an American right off the bat! Also someone metioned on this thread chatting with someone on the HP website and my first thought was "good luck with that" as I have had poor experience with that as well.

Mouse,
First I need to clarify that its "chkdsk /r". Note there is a space after chkdsk...that wasnt a typo!! You typed it in as "chkdsk/r" so I wanted to make sure your typing it in with a space through the command prompt. If you run it without the space windows wont recognize it and tell you it cant be found. When you ran chkdsk by itself it will run but wont repair anything.

Gosh from what I am reading about it freezing during the exam doesnt sound really good. And it leads me more to believe that the hard drive is really fried. Your friend is right in telling you that what should happen is your going to totally reformat and partition the drive. You wont need a recovery drive (or partition actually) because your gonna have a disk. Hopefully Janet could maybe hook you up with this. If not use your friends disk. I guess you were not getting the subtle hints of my last post. What I was trying to avoid saying (you never know maybe Bill Gates will come lookin for me) I will just flat out say anyway. Who's affraid of Bill Gates anyway right! Anyway what I am saying is regeister the copy just with your friends info. Your right if you get a new HD and then load Windows everything will work just peachy. But you want to register it because if not you will soon discover there are alot of Windows updates your gonna need. Anyway the main difference is your not going to have all the extra HP stuff (whick in my opinion is better anyway....just a bunch of junk that takes up space). At some point you may have to go to the HP website for certain drivers, but heck I even doubt that as your Windows updates should take care of that. The only time I ever needed a driver from HP was for a monitor driver, because the stadard Windows driver wouldnt let me change the settings.

Anyway Im even confused by your numbers. Its telling you its examining 57276 MB which equates to 56 GB HD, which there is no such thing. Standard would be 60GB hard drive, so I am left wondering whats hanging on to that other 4GB. Also a 60 GB hard drive is telling me that its an older computer, which makes me even lean more towards a bad HD.

So long story short I am sticking to my best advice to to rip that sucker out of there and put a new one in. When you go to the store and get one (or maybe find one from someone else) keep in mind that XP can only handle a 137 GB hard drive. Thats not to say you have to buy a smaller hard drive cause sometimes its the 160 Gb are on sale and cheaper. That just means you have partition the hard drive at 137. Its cool though because you can make a secondary partition on the other space and save pictures, music ect on it so you still have access to the space. (we can discuss that later) Your already a step ahaead by changing the boot order through the BIOS, so it should be a breeze, especially since you have done it once before.

Anyway the great thing is once you get a bigger hard drive in there your easy child will not only run again but it should be a little faster than before. When all is said and done make sure you get a good virus protection on there first and foremost. Not sure what you have now but I reccomend Avast. (avast.com) Its great and whats greater is it is free. (totally) I have had it for years and honestly I think its better than things like Norton ect. I could explain why and give you a really long post about how people who develop viruses specifically target name brand virus protection software like Norton, but again thats an entire thread in its self!!

Anyway I will check the thread from time to time as I am reading alot of other stuff. Let me know if you need any help.

 

[mistmouse]

OK Billy and EB...I put the space in and it is in the process of doing the chkdsk now.

Billy, I am not really a technical person...I can do things if they work the way expected and I can research things if they don't, but again if they don't work the way the research says they should, I am lost. I will go back to the sites and burn the hirens CD and see what I can use from that. I appreciate your help and will most likely be going to your site for help.

EB, yes it is an older computer. I have had it for a little over 3 years, maybe almost 4 years now. It has a 60 GB hard drive in it. I was only using 27 GB of that so it was plenty big enough for me. So, we will see what the chkdsk says. It is at step 4 of 5 right now so hasn't started anything I can watch yet. By the way Avast is what I had on the computer in question. It is the one I downloaded after my Norton expired and I was going to have to buy a version of that to keep it. So whatever happened, Avast didn't stop it. It is possible it wasn't caused by a virus, but just because it is old...I know about things falling apart when they get old all too well.

I will be back to post after the chkdsk.

mistmouse

 

[mistmouse]

By the way what is the difference between chkdsk /r and chkdsk /r /f?

mistmouse

 

[DammitJanet]

/r is recovering lost data when possible and /f is for fixing bad clusters generaly i do /r /f just to be on the safe side

 

[eaterbooger]

Billy nailed it. I think I just had a brain in telling you the chkdsk /r. (I was thinking "r" for repair).
Good that you have Avast already. Your probably right on target about it being old as opposed to a virus. I just seem to point that out as I have found over the years people seem to neglect that and your standard Windows XP disk wont come with any virus protection. One time my sister got a bad virus on her easy child, crashed the hard drive. I went over there and replaced the hard drive and got setup up and going. At that point I left leaving her specific instructions to get Avast as soon as she got online. Well she apparently forgot and I think it was 3 weeks later I was over there replacing the hard drive again. (Her hubby always got on some really shady sites so I wasnt surprised)
So anyways I always try to make it a point to anyone these days!!

When your done doing the chkdsk trying running the setup again and see if it will take the OS.

By the way your on step 2 of 3 according to Microsofts own advice. 3rd step says replace the HD if chkdsk doesnt work. :frown:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/811150

 

[DammitJanet]

thats something i dont get people are so naive about downloading and letting sites install plugins that they do it automaticaly
any time a site tells you to install a plug in go your self to the plugin site and download it such as shockwave or flash etc. dont just click the link on the page telling you that you need it.

 

[mistmouse]

OK, for now the computer is working somewhat. I am sure it is only a matter of time before I will have to replace the hard drive. I am afraid to attempt to try to do setup and install the OS. I think I will wait and see how much it lets me do. If I have to install another hard drive, is it going to let me use the recovery disks or am I going to have to buy an OS of my own. I talked to my friend again and he swears it will not let me register it on a second computer and that it will only let me use it for a limited time without registering due to piracy rules.

I don't know if it is going to let me do what I need to on it or not, but I will find out. It is doing a virus check now, since I had to redownload the Avast as when I used the recovery disks it wasn't there anymore. The strange thing is it was freezing on downloads so I had to go and download a download manager to be able to download the Avast.

I really just want to be able to turn on a computer and use it...either opening a program and having it do what it is supposed to, or getting on the internet. I am not a technical person.

mistmouse

 

[DammitJanet]

well a good download manager for you to use is FDM which is free and no spy ware etc :smile:
i would still recommend you maybe goto a local community college and see if you can get the student edition of xp
if not Xp sp2 upgrade edition should cost about 89.99 since you already have xp installed even though you would be wiping the hd in the process it would work for reinstalling

 

[mistmouse]

I know I am going to have to find a way to save money, but it sure is hard when there is none left over each month. I at least have a forewarning that I am going to need to do something. I have bought myself a little time, I just don't know how much. We do have a community college, but when I went there you had to have a student id to purchase software. I don't know anybody who is in college or have any friends with kids in college, but I will figure out something.

I talked to my friend and he is going to look online at some of the places he used when he was buidling his computer and see if he can find me a hard drive for less. He says since I really don't need one any bigger than what I have now he might be able to find me one for cheaper since they 60 GB hard drives aren't in great demand. He also said something about looking into purchasing a product key instead of the XP program, so maybe if he helps me out then I can save enough to replace the hard drive and get a product key so I don't have to worry about it.

I am just glad to have it somewhat operational for now. I am going to go find that download manager and see if it works better than the one I have. The thing is I had realarcade and had games from it and I can redownload them from my account, but it won't let me download realarcade. The download manager I have downloads it, but then when it goes to install realarcade has a download manager to install from and it sits on zero and won't do a thing. Don't know how I am going to get around that since I can't play the realarcade games without downloading realarcade again. Minor details...I can access this site, what more do I want?

mistmouse

 

[Lothlorien]

I had to buy an external hard drive recently, because of issues that I had. I had to restore my computer several times. I would not download any games, right now, if I were you. That may have been part of the problem. You may have filled up your hard drive with those games. They do take up a lot of space on your hard drive. I've downloaded a couple of the kids games, after I restored my computer. Every time I did that (they were low memory games) I started having problems. Wait until you get the new hard drive and if you are going to put games on your computer, you may want to look into getting a bigger hard drive and adding RAM.

 

[mistmouse]

I suppose it could have been the games, although the only ones downloaded were through realarcade which I have been a member of for over a year. For my monthly membership fee I get one free game a month and that is all I ever downloaded. My hard drive is a 60 GB hard drive, and my used space on it was a little over 27 GB at the time I was having problems. So, I wasn't even using half the space. It may be that I need to add RAM. Right now I am okay that it is even working. At least difficult child will have a way to do homework if she needs to for the time being. I was able to reinstall the printer to this computer after I got it back up and running.

Thanks to everybody for their help.

mistmouse

 

[DammitJanet]

Keep watching freecycle. I just saw on mine a computer this morning and I live in a small area. Most likely you may have to join one in an adjoining larger town if you can drive to that area to get better items but it is worth it.