Weird Dell Laptop problem

[AustinMatherne]

Well, I've had a few troubles with my laptop, and this is probably the one issue where I'm guaranteed to switch to Linux.

I have McAfee Antivirus installed, DC++, MS Office and basically all of the default software that came with my laptop. Anyway, I was busy on AIM chatting with my friends and I was in the process of deleting some pictures taken from my digital camera, and my laptop just froze. I restarted my laptop only to find out none of my icons show and my taskbar is GONE. I'm talking about a flat out generic desktop background. I'm talking about the stupid hilltop background when you first install windows XP. (then again I've had that for a while)

I've tried everything from System Restore to manually launching Explorer but nothing launches, and nothing happens.

I can?t reinstall windows because Dell did not supply me with the OEM Windows disk.

Any suggestions would gladly be appreciated.

 

[SparkyJJO]

You can reinstall windows. You need to either make the CD (they include a CD creator) or use the recovery partition (I believe you punch F11 right after the bios screen).

Could be an HD error that caused the laptop to basically dump explorer, OR a virus. Can you launch internet explorer from task manager? If so type in control panel in the address bar, go to add/remove programs and remove McAfee. Then go to free.grisoft.com and download AVG free and install it. Update it, then perform a full system scan. As for recovering explorer you may need to find that app to create the windows install CD so you can run recovery console in the windows setup and reinstall explorer.

Reason why I'm saying this is McAfee can be crap sometimes. Someone here at school I know had McAfee on her system and she got a virus. It activated, sent copies of itself through the whole school network to everyone on her AIM buddy list and IT shut down her port to stop it (she had to go get it reactivated later). Finally McAfee woke up and said "heeyy.... you got virus! What do you want to do?" Then "Oh, sorry, can't remove it!" - I'm loosely paraphrasing what it did I use AVG free and when the virus came over the network to me it stopped it cold and killed it.

 

[pcgeek11]

Everytime I've personally seen this is was an infection... Sounds like someone sent you a present through AIM.

As was stated above reinstall is from the recovery partition...

pcgeek11