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New Windows 7 Laptop - System Restore Is Failing - Not Sure What To Do


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#1
adifrank

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i bought a new HP laptop from Best Buy less than a week ago. The exact model is: HP g4-1117dx. An inexpensive unit for simple tasks. It came installed with Windows 7 Home Premium. It's my first dip into anything post XP.

Anyways, the first thing I did was make a set of recovery disk (3xcds) using the HP Recovery Manager utility. The next thing I did was to uninstall some bloatware that came pre-installed. Then installed some programs I need and some drivers.

Everything was going well until I attempted to install an Adobe CS5 product. After trying to install, I got a message that some components of the software failed to install and that it might not function properly due to this.

Prior to installing the Adobe software, I made a system restore point manually. Since I wasn't sure what exactly what successfully installed and what failed... I decided to just restore my system to the restore point I made rather than trying to uninstall the programs.

I selected the restore point, hit "restore" and after a minute or so of what seemed to be the restore process doing its thing - I got this message: System Restore did not complete successfully. Details: An unspecified error occurred during System Restore. (0xc0000056)

I tried restoring to an earlier restore point - failed. Got the same message. Also tried quitting all running programs, firewalls and antiviruses. Same fail message.

I tried restoring system in safe mode... actually not sure it was safe mode. i hit F8 on startup and it took me to the HP recovery manager that offered several options, one of which was system restore. I selected that. System restore went through the motions but failed. This time I got a window suggesting to do some sort of recommended restore. It said that Windows will automatically figure out which restore point to go to according to when the system was running well. This process took about 15 minutes. In the end I got another "fail" error message. Yet... when Windows came up I saw that the Adobe programs were gone. I can't really tell to which restore point it fell back to and I have no idea what exactly "failed" according to the message I got.

So basically, I'm just asking here if maybe someone knows what might be causing all of this and how I might be able to get my new computer to a healthy state. It feels lousy to get a brand new computer out of the box and already face these sort of errors and failed processes, not knowing what sort of junk it created on my system. I'm kind of contemplating using my recovery disks and starting over... but then again, knowing my luck... that will fail too and I'll end up having Windows not starting up at all.

I might add that I DON'T have the original Windows CD, because of some lame policy by Microsoft in which they no longer supply their installation CDs with new laptops, even though Windows is installed. So unless you pay extra to purchase the CDs, you're stuck with the recovery disks (which you're allowed to create once, by the way).

Looking forward for some advice on what to do. THX!
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#2
SRX660

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H-P has always been good about being able to get a recovery kit from them for a pretty cheap price. They have one for your computer.

http://h10025.www1.h...ct=5118773#N630

The last time i had to do this the set of DVD's cost me $38. I ran the disks on the computer i was fixing and the recovery put it back like the computer came from the factory. That's cheap when you consider the price of a microsoft DVD and you still need to download the hardware drivers from the H-P website and you also lose some of the software that H-P includes on their systems.

SRX660
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#3
adifrank

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SRX660, thanks for replying. So what you're saying is you recommend, at this point, to bring my computer back to factory settings?
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#4
SRX660

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Personally, that is what i would do since you have had the computer for only one week. You really can't add that much data to a computer in one week unless you are using backups and if that's true you will still have the backups. By doing this you can find out what program is affecting the computer. Then the first thing to do is make sure restore is working. I cannot even count how many times i have used restore to fix peoples computers without them bringing the computer to my house to fix after a problem program is installed or bad download. When your done restoring then install programs one at a time checking that they are working properly. If the Adobe CS5 program causes a problem again(maybe even install it first) you may need to see if there is a fix, or use some other similar program that is more compatible with Win 7. The win 7 compatibility list does show Adobe CS5 as compatible.

I would order the recovery disks from H-P simply because i always do that, so when i sell the computer people are more likely to buy it. I usually use the recovery disks to reinstall anyway so the new owners are not left with a computer not to their liking because of changes i have made. I only keep a computer for about a year before selling it as i get the most value from it that way. Don't get me wrong here. I still have a pentium 4 XP computer, Pentium quad core XP computer, Vista dual core Toshiba laptop, Acer Aspire one netbook and lots of spare parts so when i need to look things up for older OSes i have the comp's available. I run a computer repair business from my house in my spare time.

SRX660
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#5
adifrank

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Thanks SRX660.
I just did a complete computer recovery. Now it's back to how it was when I bought it.
I'm about to go ahead and attempt to install Adobe CS5, but before I do that I'd like to refer you to a couple of posts I found on the Adobe forums which seem to address the exact problem I was having. Maybe there's something there I should be aware of before I try to install. It's a rather long installation process (about 30-40 minutes) so I just want to know I've covered all bases before I go through with it all again.
If you could take a minute to look through these posts and tell me what you think, I'd really appreciate it.
Here's one:
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/631445

and here's the other:
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/847704

Thanks! :)
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#6
SRX660

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If you need to then try the adobe forum fixes. I would try the first one first unless you did not have any adobe on before.

SRX660
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