Trouble installing anything on acer 5050

[Red Squirrel]

People keep bringing me computers to fix... now this time it's an Acer aspire 5050 laptop. They were getting tons of weird errors beyond repair so I decided to do a clean install of XP, which went smooth... except now, ANYTHING I try to install just hangs at 0%. Anyone ever seen this before? I did a memtest and a HDD test and both return good. This is really frustrating.

The only app that actually installed correctly was firefox. Any other operation such as file transfers work fine. But no driver will install, it just hangs at 0%.

 

[Firsttime]

That seems more like it would be an OS problem then a hardware one. Did you try re-installing XP again in case something went wrong/got corrupted?

 

[Red Squirrel]

That seems more like it would be an OS problem then a hardware one. Did you try re-installing XP again in case something went wrong/got corrupted?

That's what I did, I formatted and reinstalled XP fresh. The install went fine but now any driver I try to install just locks up.

I did manage to install one manually through device manager though... but this is not looking good. I'm wondering if it's a heat issue, the bios has no way to check the temp of the cpu so I can't really tell but it is quite warm.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Managed to get most drivers installed had to do it manually in device manager. I HATE searching for drivers.

Still can't install some apps like Adobe reader, I'll try another version and see. It's weird as other then that everything else works fine, it's just installers, they stay stuck.

 

[Red Squirrel]

haha the hard drive failed lol. The click of death. Guess that HDD test tool I use is no good if it was not able to detect that the drive was failing. My issues were most likely due to this. I had actually made an image RIGHT before it happened too, good thing I put the image on my network. Those drivers were a pita to find, would not want to repeat that process again. I still could not find the mouse pad drivers though... did not realize I even needed drivers for that till I went to use it.

Oh well, now I'll see what the owner wants to do, order a drive or just forget it.