Latest Posts in Hardware and Software

Your cooling system is most likely clogged full of dust, you need to get in there and clean it out. I bet there is a wad of dust between the heatsink and fan.
I open up and clean out my own laptop once a year and it keeps it running nice and cool.

Get the chipset and gpu reflowed and it should be up and running again. Make sure you clean the cooling system out too.

If the inverter was gone then the screen would be dark. If the cable was faulty then you'd have no output. It's the screen itself, you need to fit a replacement one in there.

Ancient, I'm using IE6 [rarely], but I'm going to guess nothing much has changed... :)
What if you physically edit this key [or sim, for IE10] to reflect your homepage URL?

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main]

So: "Start Page"="http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/dogville/"

Or check that it at least reflects the home page that you tried to set?

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-windows_update/windows-continually-offers-me-the-same-updates/1d8cb3c6-4288-41ac-9e70-acc6623b16a9
Anything useful there?

like that little storage box, i just take mine out and lay it on my desk ,so far safe

any who says vist is better than win7 ,never used win7 .

Rik ,you would have made no money off my Wife,here Toshiba D350[i think might have been a 550] laptop ran win vist for 4 years ,orignal install with no problems,except the motherboard or cpu died last week with out warning

i'ts a Vista.

Hi, if its a brand name tower,what is the make and model number of the tower.
it may not have a factory restore partition on the harddrive

If you don't like Windows 7 then I can't wait to hear what you think of Windows 8 :)

The one thing that may help is file cleaner. To run it, type cmd in the search box on your start menu and press enter. In the resulting dos box type sfc /scannow. If it makes no difference then you will need to do what AHarrisGsy suggests.

Something like this shall do, or the metal case should be ok however with it being metal that is also conductive and therefore might cause some issues, however if it was like this when you got it and it hasn't been a problem this far, then there is no reason why it shouldn't be fine to use again.

i have a dock simular to the one in the link ,i like it better than a enclosure as i work on other peoples hdd and not having to take a external enclosure apart all the time to put the customers hdd into it to work on it , ,but i have enclosures with hdd in them for file storage ,I would reccomend a new enclosure if you want to take the drive with you .safer less chance of damaging the hdd when traveling/storing or just moving about ,with the hard drive

You can try the soldering iron by all means, however I think it shall be difficult to either even begin attaching it or if you did to try and maintain a good connection. I certainly wouldn't trust it in the long term, but as an emergency file recovery it could be possible. The problem is that unless you can borrow one, a soldering iron would cost about the same as a docking station so I would go for the more permanent solution.

With a laptop, it is likely to be using a 2.5" HDD, which means you won't be able to fit it into the computer to begin with, you could buy a male to female adaptor though and run the HDD on the outside, again it would only be for emergency file recovery.

Personally I would either buy a docking station, or the cables and use the HDD as a simple HDD. If you are going to do it like this however, it might be worth investing in a plastic case for it such as a project box. This way it shall be protected from static and the day to day handling of it.

If a file is corrupt then unfortunately it is corrupt. Simply removing the malware isn't going to magically cause the file to re-assemble themselves and the problem goes away.

What you're going to need to do initially is make sure you have definetly removed all traces of the virus, this is the most important bit. Try running various tools to make sure it has gone for good.

Secondly, check all your backups (assuming you do make them) for any traces of the virus. The last thing you want is for those to have been infected.

If your system files are damaged, then the only thing you can do is a complete reinstall of the OS, if they are fine on the otherhand then locate the software which has corrupted files and then either repair them or uninstall and re-install them completely.

By the sounds of it however, because you can't install things properly then either the system files have been damaged or the virus is still lingering.