I am working on a Compaq Presario CQ60-215DX that crashed a week ago. Its a long story, but in a nutshell, the laptop was delivered with Vista installed. The client didn’t like Vista and had the previous tech downgrade to XP pro. Since the crash, I have had to rebuild the boot.ini file, mbr and boot sector. Then I ran a “Fix” install from an XP pro installation CD and everything seemed to be going just fine. Upon the initial boot, Windows needed to be re-activated because of all the changes. This didn’t go very smoothly at all and I had to argue with MS over the phone regarding the validity of the license and such. I should tell you, that my client’s previous tech took all of the installation CD’s with him and did not provide any product keys. He has since disappeared, but that’s neither here nor there. So once I got MS to give me a valid down grade key for the install to complete, I was finally able to boot the system. Only when the system came back up, it was completely screwed up. Drivers missing or not working, processes locking up at start-up and needing to terminate. Plus, the sys is running VERY slow. I have run several Local and Portable Virus Scan Apps, but I have yet to find anything malicious. I cannot establish an Internet connection, yet I can PING anywhere over the web and get 4 replies like I should. I’m thinking that whatever caused the system to crash has re-manifested…even after the fix install was complete. I do have a log file from Hijack This from the system…Will someone look at it for me and tell me if I am missing something wrong here. I’m sick of beating my brain over it and I’m ready to do a full reformet and fresh install of Vista to bring it back to the way it was when it left the factory. Thanks for reading my long post:)
Steve