Computer question

[dennis thompson]

My wife's computer,when starting up, goes to the welcome screen & stops. The little circle below the welcome word just keeps circling. If I hit control.alternate , delete & click the mouse on the screen it will go to the open screen with all her icons. Any thoughts on what might be wrong? It's Dell laptop using Vista.
Thanks
Dennis

[Myk Rian]

Any thoughts on what might be wrong? It's Dell laptop using Vista.

Vista. Upgrade to Win 7. You might get it for cheap from Dell.

[paul cottingham]

Sounds like a corrupt registry to me. Can you restore?

[Greg Portland]

If I hit control.alternate , delete & click the mouse on the screen it will go to the open screen with all her icons.

What happens when you just C-A-Delete? What are you clicking with your mouse?

[Andrew Pitonyak]

My usual solution is to boot a Linux Live disk (such as Knoppix), which allows me to check things such as:

1. Is the problem computer related, or Windows configuration related.
2. Perform maintenance things on the machine while the installed Operating System is not running.

As an example, a friend just could not access the Internet. he thought he might have a bad cable. I booted into Linux, he had access, so we knew that the hardware was fine. Seems that he lost power while installing some anti-virus software, and it had taken out his Internet connection. We removed the anti-virus software and the problem went away.

Note that this tells you that say your computer is not dead, but it does not really help you with Windows specific issues. Note that from Knoppix, I can mount the Windows drive, which allows me to see that the drive is indeed readable. When I had a drive fail and Windows could not access it, I was still able to get all my data from Knoppix (it is speculated that one of the file allocation tables had failed so Windows refused to touch it but Linux was smart enough to ignore the bad one and simply use the good one.

If it looks like the hardware is good, but I am not sure about the state, then I linux tools (say something like "CloneZilla" (you can download a bootable CD), which you can then use to backup the entire drive or partition to a USB drive. This way, if you mess things up, you can always put them back. Historically, I have used NTSFClone to copy damaged partitions from laptops and then move them to a new larger hard drive.

After backing up the partition, you can make changes knowing that you can always put the old partition back. So, I would then boot the Windows CD / DVD and see if it is able to fix itself.

[paul cottingham]

My usual solution is to boot a Linux Live disk (such as Knoppix), which allows me to check things such as:

1. Is the problem computer related, or Windows configuration related.
2. Perform maintenance things on the machine while the installed Operating System is not running.

As an example, a friend just could not access the Internet. he thought he might have a bad cable. I booted into Linux, he had access, so we knew that the hardware was fine. Seems that he lost power while installing some anti-virus software, and it had taken out his Internet connection. We removed the anti-virus software and the problem went away.

Note that this tells you that say your computer is not dead, but it does not really help you with Windows specific issues. Note that from Knoppix, I can mount the Windows drive, which allows me to see that the drive is indeed readable. When I had a drive fail and Windows could not access it, I was still able to get all my data from Knoppix (it is speculated that one of the file allocation tables had failed so Windows refused to touch it but Linux was smart enough to ignore the bad one and simply use the good one.

If it looks like the hardware is good, but I am not sure about the state, then I linux tools (say something like "CloneZilla" (you can download a bootable CD), which you can then use to backup the entire drive or partition to a USB drive. This way, if you mess things up, you can always put them back. Historically, I have used NTSFClone to copy damaged partitions from laptops and then move them to a new larger hard drive.

After backing up the partition, you can make changes knowing that you can always put the old partition back. So, I would then boot the Windows CD / DVD and see if it is able to fix itself.

+1 For this solution. As is should be obvious by now, I think the solution to every computer problem is Linux.....:-)

[Mark Engel]

My wife's computer,when starting up, goes to the welcome screen & stops. The little circle below the welcome word just keeps circling. If I hit control.alternate , delete & click the mouse on the screen it will go to the open screen with all her icons. Any thoughts on what might be wrong? It's Dell laptop using Vista.
Thanks
Dennis

I know exactly what is wrong. The computer is not working properly.

[Kevin W Johnson]

Is there more than one user on this laptop? If so, does selecting another user boot to the desktop properly? If there are no other users, go to the control panel-- user accounts, and create another user. Then log out of her account, and into the other user. If it goes to the desktop of the other user ok, then the problem is most likely a user config file problem.

[dennis thompson]

Is there more than one user on this laptop? If so, does selecting another user boot to the desktop properly? If there are no other users, go to the control panel-- user accounts, and create another user. Then log out of her account, and into the other user. If it goes to the desktop of the other user ok, then the problem is most likely a user config file problem.

Kevin
I followed your instructions & it worked, thanks for the advice
Dennis