Need Help

General Topics
1

Hey Guys

Alright I need some help with my friends grandma’s computer Any problem they have they ask me and usually im able to give them information and such and clear viruses and such things as that but my friends grandma’s computer has really gave me a problem its a HP Windows Vista Home Premium computer and I just compiled a list of the problems shes having and was hoping a more experienced technician could give me some insight on these problems.

The first is that shes continuously getting warnings about here Disk Drive D: being full last time I took a look on her computer it was infact getting full but I dont know if I can clear it out or not to save some space it is her System Recovery Partition and last time I tried to access the drive I could not access it because they were I believe “System Files”

The Second is a tricky one to describe It involves her startup at first she told me it was slow which I would be able to fix myself by disabling programs that are unneeded during startup but then she told me more she told me that shes press the power button and turn it on but nothing will load so she’ll shut it down and then if she doesnt press the power button at the exact right time the computer will lock up completely on her so she has to go through the process all over again

the third is that she used to have a old Win XP computer and I helped their aunt switch the HD out of that computer into a external Hard Drive and we were sucessfull but the problem is that all of the files shes switching form the XP Hd to her Vista computer were in Wordpad format but when she switches them over to Vista they are transfered into Microsoft office word document, which she doesnt have on her computer so she cannot access them

and the 4th problem is with her Windows Live Messenger I noticed this problem first hand when she is not using it, it will automatically sign itself in and come up with friend contacts and help files and such pretty much by itself to me this sounds Kind of like Worm trying to spread itself but I do not know for sure

I am very sorry if these arent really clear bu the explanations I was given over the phone weren’t really exactally clear either

thanks,
-Justin

2

  1. I would have thought if it were a recovery partition, a) it would be protected and b) it wouldn’t get any larger, that is the whole point of these recovery partitions it effectively sets your system back to what it was when it left HP. So I don’t know what is going on if it is getting larger. What are the warnings and probably more important what is giving them ?

  2. Not sure this could be a hardware problem and difficult to pinpoint.

  3. This is possibly just down to file associations with MS Office being associated with the wordpad file format (.rtf, if I remember rightly). So try holding the Shift key and right click one of the files that should give the option to Open With. That should give a drop down list of applications, if WordPad is in the list select it and tick the ‘Use this always’ or words to that effect. If WordPad isn’t in the list you will have to click Browse and find the folder where it is.

  4. Sorry don’t use Live Messenger.

3

Have you tried a boot time scan?

Have you run MBAM?

Have you run HJT?

4

Charley0 I’m guessing you are referring to the windows Live issue? I have not Run any antimalware yet but I’m going to be trying to fix these issues probably the whole day tomorrow and will be running all types of Anti-malware to see if it is whats causing that Live issue.