[lizzmac]

I'm desperate. I can tinker a bit, but I'm running out of ideas and time. My daughter has an MSI A-6000 laptop running Windows 7. As background (maybe helpful, maybe not) a few months ago she suddenly lost the wireless icon in the system tray, and the ability to detect wireless connections (we have a Netgear router in the house). I was able to get that restored by disabling and re-enabling the network adapter. During that process, discovered she had quite a few viral infections and cleaned them all (I think).

About 5-6 weeks ago she started having problems again, and this time nothing I do can restore the wireless ability. And there are a fleet of other symptoms:
- was able to get the wireless icon back in the system tray, but when I click on 'connect' to our router and am asked for the key - can type only one letter, then get an error message about the referenced memory not being found
- similarly, when I click on the Start button and type in the search box (say, to type 'cmd') - once I type one letter, an 'x' appears on the right of the search box, and I'm not able to actually search for anything
- chkdsk has been running on startup repeatedly - I have run the (oh, shoot, what's it called - the Windows diagnostic thing, where you can right-click on the drive, and it checks the disk and repairs, if possible, when re-started)
- occasionally get the BSOD referencing Process1_intialization_failed or a kernel error
- I've run the Windows Memory Diagnostic Tool and it doesn't seem to find a problem
- following a search online, I downloaded and ran HDTune and it said there are two bad sectors

It seems there are corrupted files and/or a problem with the hard disk - but I'm not sure where to go from here. She's leaving in a week for college, and I'd sure like to have this fixed before then Are there other tools I can use to help me find out exactly what the problem is?

Thank you SO MUCH in advance for any help you can provide. As I said above, I'm desperate!

Liz

One more thing - Windows Update can't run. I tried downloading and running the System Readiness Tool (I think that's what it's called) - and got a message saying it could not be installed.