[ryanSwald]

I have a Dell Inspiron 1521 that was installed with Vista, and have recently encountered a number of problems.

The laptop itself is about a year and a half years old, but I've only had it for about 6 months. It was originally a family members of mine, and she had a ton of problems with it right at the beginning. She had to send it back to Dell a few times to fix certain problems. I can't recall what exactly was wrong with it, but they eventually fixed it. And up until now, I haven't had any problems with it until last night.

The first thing I noticed was that when I had left for work, I had shut it down right before. But when I got home later that evening, it still had the logging off sign. I eventually just had to power it down manually. When I rebooted it, I noticed it took a lot longer for the applications themselves to load, and that my internet didn't connect automatically. I clicked on "connect to network" and just a blank white page popped up, and when I tried to minimize and exit it, it wouldn't allow me to do either. From there I went to task manager to try and quit the programs from that, but even that would not open. I saw the green bar in taskbar, but when I clicked it nothing happened. And I also couldn't quit that application either. After numerous times of me shutting down manually, I finally was able to connect to the internet. Browsing the internet itself was fine. It ran smoothly with no pop ups or error messages. But everything I described previously happened. I can't even open up McAfee to run a virus scan.

I was wondering if anyone has encountered a problem like this before, and if you have any tips to help fix the problem. A friend offered to wipe my computer and install a version of XP, but if there's a way around that, I'm all ears. Thanks!


p.s. sorry for the same topic posts (accident). It didn't post my topic originally so here it is.

[Advertisements]

Run a checkdisk on drive C. (I forget how to do it in Vista but in XP you just open up My computer-->right click on your C drive-->properties-->tools-->check now.)

[Blood Elemental]

Run a checkdisk on drive C. (I forget how to do it in Vista but in XP you just open up My computer-->right click on your C drive-->properties-->tools-->check now.)

[ryanSwald]

Ok, I found how to do it. It was the same for as Vista as XP. However, it wouldn't let me do a check. It said, "cannot do this while in use" or something along the lines of that.

[Blood Elemental]

It should give you the option of performing the check after a reboot.

[Nimwe]

Since it's a Dell, it should also have a diagnostic partition. You can access this one of 2 ways. The first is to boot the pc and press the F12 key at the Dell BIOS screen, then select diagnostics. The second is to press and hold the blue Fn key (next to the left windows key) while you press the power button. When the pc starts, it will say "Diagnostic Boot Selected" in the upper right corner. The first screen that should come up at this point is a blue screen that will run several simple diagnostics. There are 2 DST status tests that run at this point. If either of them fail, your drive is bad. This will not find all drive problems, but it will find at least 90% of them.

Edited by Nimwe, 31 December 2008 - 10:31 PM.

[ryanSwald]

Ok, so I ran both the diagnostics check and did the c: system check at the startup, and they were no problems with either of them. My virus scan even started to work (hadn't been letting me scan before).

[Blood Elemental]

Is the problem still occurring? If so then try doing a system restore to a day that it was previously working.

[ryanSwald]

It actually works perfectly now, even better than when I first got it it seems. It shutdowns, restarts, etc...All my virus scans work now, and everything seems to be running smoothly. I was able to do a system restore to about a month ago just to make sure, but everything seems to be in order. I'm not sure what happened, but I thank both of you very much!!