Laptop woes

Deadman_ny

Spaceman
I got my sister a laptop for her birthday. It was pretty cool little thing only 9"x 9" and loaded up with XP in like 10 sec. Been 2 weeks and she already trashed it....
First thing I told her to do was go to the store and buy Norton for 30$ since she wanted to surf the net. Instead she clicks on a pop-up and downloads the virus program AWOL. Never heard of it and it didn't do jack, in fact I think it's part of the problem. I can't uninstall it... Uninstalled AWOL, deleted it from the registry all that fun stuff. Keeps coming back. Installed Norton 360, did virus scans..finds the viruses and says it needs to restart to effect changes and it locks up. Comp is screwed so I think.. I know that installing Nortan AFTER being infected wouldn't help but there's always hope. :)
I have another full version of XP SP2, I'll just reinstall or upgrade, but the laptop has no cd/dvd drive. So I put the XP in my computer and connected her Laptop to my network. OMG, my virusware went crazy on my desktop blocking trojans and fun stuff like that.
Tried system restore too....even worse. Then the touchpad and sound went bye bye. Got all that working again now. I've never had trouble with a virus so my experience is limted.
Any suggestions as to how to get her comp working? I'm al up for a full disk wipe since it's the simplest way to fix the problem. But with no cd drive... Any suggestions.

The laptop is a Dell Latadude D410
 
Your best bet might to bring it in to a servicing center and have them completely reformat the hard drive.
 
Another thing you can do is pick up an external CD/DVD drive. They can be the big external ones or portable ones, depending on how much you want to spend and how often it'll be needed.

That might be useful anyways if you need to install something off a CD or DVD or she needs to burn something.

Also, purchase a copy of Acronis TrueImage or something, and use it to back up her computer so you can at least restore to the condition it was in, rather than go through the whole reformat/reinstall process.
 
Its unusual for a system to be sold with no recovery/reinstallation options at all - check the manual, it might be possible to restore from a hidden partition on the HDD or something along those lines. Failing that, its usually possible to boot over a network and install XP that way, though Ive never done it myself.

Whatever you do, do it now - that system is actively hostile, and will be launching similar attacks across the internet whenever its connected. Potentially, it could be attacking over wifi connections as well.
 
Well, first thing I did when I got the computer was make a restore point since I've never screwed my computer so bad that restore woudn't fix it and since she was only going to use the laptop to surf and write papers I didn't picture this hasppening.
I've tried using restore, but that screws it up even more. Even tried running in Safe Mode but it fries the mouse pad and sound, and vid drivers.
She's not going to want to blow money on an external cd/dvd drive. Even a cheap one.
Now I can get the lap top to recognise my network and you can get on the net but I can't get her laptop to recognise my network drives external/cd/dvd. With my laptop I can read and write from and to these drives so I was hoping that I could mount the Windows XP cd in my computer and install through there or at least partition her laptop hdd and copy the xp cd to it and do a clean install.
Nero has a pretty good backup utility where you can either save the backup to another partition or dvd. If a problem arises you can do a complete system restore.
She screwed it up. If she doesn't want to blow the 50$ on an external cd/dvd...she should have spent the 30$ on the antivirus in the first place instead of clicking on an add and downloading god knows what.
 
Back
Top