Computer Help!

[carltonfan43]

i have newish laptop and i all of a sudden i turned it on and it loaded up and came up with my documents but had no taskbar or desktop or anything. For example if i minimized my documents it would just be a black screen.

If i press ctrl,alt,delete i can still access my programs by starting new tasks.

Does anyone know what this is and how i can fix it

thanks
also i am using windows vista

 

[W-Zebrass]

solved it?

 

[roguless54]

Gee Vista is rubbish .. ever heard anyone with nothing but a completely pleasant vista experience? I reset the comp if or when i ever come across that problem, a friend told me about entering explorer in the start>run section, but i dont know how well that works.

I wonder wat kinda specs ur comp has? If you got a celeron processor and 512mb of ram, it wouldnt be too uncommon for this kinda stuff to be happening if your overloading the computer with a bunch of apps auto running at start up along with a whole bunch of that pre installed junk the big companies bundle with vista such as norton amongst other things.

If your computer is a bit underpowered as such, worth running through a simple program like CCleaner to clean up some excess junk and purge through the start ups down to the bare minimums as well as manually going through your installed programs and dumping off a bunch of excess stuff you dont need or hardly use, good luck

 

[old_clint]

i have newish laptop and i all of a sudden i turned it on and it loaded up and came up with my documents but had no taskbar or desktop or anything. For example if i minimized my documents it would just be a black screen.

If i press ctrl,alt,delete i can still access my programs by starting new tasks.

Does anyone know what this is and how i can fix it

thanks
also i am using windows vista

Did you remember to activate your o/s? Sounds like Windows Reduced Functionality.

In the worst case you may have been hit by a virus.
If you are able, click into users in the Control Panel and create a new user account, reboot and log in to that account. Immediately go to the user folder in Explorer and delete any users which appear there, which you do not recognise. (leave All Users: Default :default user and Public.
If you still have the problem,try pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL to fire up the Task Manager. From the File menu, select New Task (Run...). Type in "explorer" and press OK. That should restart explorer and re-display your taskbar. From there you should be able to see if you have any applications running which should not be there.
Again, if you are able, type Msconfig in the RUN and see if there is anything unusual starting up under the startup tab.

 

[RoosterLad]

I thought I might just put this question in here and hope one of you geniuses reads it, rather than starting a new thread.

Last night I got my mates laptop off him so I can try and fix it. It is a HP Pavilion dv6000 which has had quite a few problems from what I've read online already and this is the second time it's cocked up. I have tried to Google the problem but I've found nothing.

When Windows boots up an error message pops up saying "File not found C:\Users\User\AppData\Local\Temp\xwitxqph.dll Missing entry:run"

I tried to find that file online with no success.

Then if I try and enter Computer, which is like My Computer I guess, it opens.. begins to load then the screen goes blank of icons with just the background picture displayed. After a few seconds everything comes back on but there is no folder open.

It has Vista built into the laptop I believe, is it possible/wise to install XP? My mate asked me to put that on but I'm not sure if that's a good idea or not.

 

[Pantsless]

1. The first thing about "missing entry" sounds like something is trying to run at startup that doesn't exist anymore. Click the STart button, and in the search box type msconfig and click the Startup tab and you should see an entry with that dll file. Just untick the box. That will get rid of the message. This happened on one of our work computers.

2. Not sure what that about sorry....

 

[Benno_900]

I thought I might just put this question in here and hope one of you geniuses reads it, rather than starting a new thread....

Vista is a piece of crap. I had a similar problem but with start up.

Anyway, try creating a new user profile and checking if it works out OK there (the profile could just be corrupted). If that isn't possible, reboot with the Vista DVD (if you have it) and try 'startup repair'.

 

[RoosterLad]

Thanks for the help so far lads but I'm not getting anywhere unfortunately.

There is no Vista disc, I think it's just built into the laptop. After the last time it died I made a recovery disc.. just put that in and rebooted only to get the message "This PC is not designed for System Recovery discs" or something like that anyway. So it seems that disc is no good.

Is there any other way of doing a recovery and installing Vista?

Would it be safe for me to just put XP on? At least I know XP and it is very stable for me, my mate wants it installed as well. I have used Vista a limited amount of times so don't quite know my way around it yet, and don't really intend on learning it either.

 

[JasRulz63]

I originally had Vista installed on this computer, and I just put XP back on it, much happier

I reckon that's the way to go .

 

[Benno_900]

Would it be safe for me to just put XP on? At least I know XP and it is very stable for me, my mate wants it installed as well. I have used Vista a limited amount of times so don't quite know my way around it yet, and don't really intend on learning it either.

Would probably be your best option, shouldn't be a problem. Shits all over Vista anyway.

 

[RoosterLad]

I tried to install XP on the laptop the other night but ran into some problems.

When I first rebooted with the XP disc in, I went to "intall XP" and it said there was no hard drive present... even though Vista manages to load up. I thought this was maybe due to the fact Vista is already installed so I thought I would just do a format and then install XP.

How do I format the hard drive in Vista? I have no idea how to get into DOS! I am only given "boot sequence" and "setup" when the laptop first boots up.

 

[Benno_900]

Strange...It should give you an option to select the Vista hard drive partition and format/delete it when you boot with the XP CD. Since the laptop has come pre-installed with Vista, maybe some of the hardware may not be compatible with XP?

 

[old_clint]

Strange...It should give you an option to select the Vista hard drive partition and format/delete it when you boot with the XP CD. Since the laptop has come pre-installed with Vista, maybe some of the hardware may not be compatible with XP?

Try http://www.bootdisk.com/

 

[RoosterLad]

I took it into a repair shop yesterday.
Today I dropped the Recovery CD off and a couple of hours later a bloke rang me to tell me that the CD I gave him was for the wrong model... despite the fact the ____ing laptop created it.

The other day I spoke to a cluey mate about it and he came up with two suggestions:

1) the hard drive needs a boot disk, which old clint might be speaking about

or

2) I need an XP CD with SP2 built in

It turns out the problem with the windows not opening properly was a bad virus which had ravaged the system, my mate had a virus protector but only got it recently so obviously the virus got in there before this was installed.