I have a Gateway laptop that is about six years old. I bought it really cheap off of my wife’s co-worker a couple of years ago. It was perfect for what we used it for, basically facebook, SDMB, and my wife could get onto her company’s intranet and wrap up unfinished work at night. The DVD drive never worked but I never needed it. It has Windows XP Media Center Edition, SP3.
Recently it started to flake out. It wouldn’t hibernate at all, and would only stay in standby for five minutes or so. At the same time it would, on start up, give me a message saying “Generic Process for Win32 has encountered a problem and needs to close.” Then everything would usually work OK except for the standby and hibernation. I tried everything to fix it, Hijack This gave no clues. I noticed that my Spyware Doctor had been disabled at some point without my realizing it and also that the Windows Firewall was down. I fixed both of these and did deep scans that found very little. This fixed the “Generic Process” error but it still wouldn’t hibernate. That continued for about two weeks. Yesterday, on start up, I got an error message of a type I have never seen. It said that lsass.exe had an error and then the computer rebooted. Over and over again. Every time it came up it gave the same error and rebooted. In Safe Mode it gave me the error and rebooted. I have tried restoring to previous times when it was working fine and this did not change anything.
Is it time to throw in the towel? I don’t have the restore CD and even if I did the DVD drive doesn’t work. I have a USB DVD drive but I doubt that would work even if I did have the restore CD. Is it worth taking to a professional, would they even be able to restore XP to it? It doesn’t have the resources to run Vista or 7. I wouldn’t feel terrible about throwing it away because I’ve gotten way more than my money’s worth out of it.
Are you sure it’s a restore CD and not on a partition? We’d need to know the model number to get a good idea if it has a restore partition.
It sounds like your hard drive might be going. Booting from a USB drive IS possible in the BIOS settings of most computers, so don’t rule that out yet.
When I boot up, it says “Hit F11 to restore.” I hit F11, and it asks for the restore CD. Looking at the restore partition, there is hardly anything there, no .exe or anything I could run.
Change the BIOS and boot from a CD or USB and leave it running for some time to see if it shuts down or tries to reboot on its own. If it does, then you probably have a hardware problem in the area of the internal power supply of the laptop. If it stays powered up then there are checks you can make from their on the hard disk using programs from the Internet. If it is the power supply, I would not invest anything in it.
It sounds like you have a several unrelated issues. Your OS binaries are corrupt. A reinstall would fix that. Windows will do a drive scan on the reinstall. If the media (ie platter surface) is damaged it may refuse to install because of potential corruption. If the unit has a BIOS backup battery (typically a coin style lithium battery) you may also want to replace that given the age of the machine.
If you don’t have a copy of an OS you can put on a thumb drive or similar you are kind of SOL. You could download a Linux flavor to a USB thumbdrive and install that just for fun. I’m not sure what Linux OS would work best on an old Pentium III or Pentium IV class machine.
Hmm, I’ve used Knoppix in the past. I could try that on a thumb drive. What would I do if I got it running? Replace lsass.exe? Back in the day, Knoppix couldn’t write to an NTFS partition, is that still the case?
This is just a shot in the dark and still don’t understand why it should make a difference, but apparently it does.
I assume that just like regular desktop computers, laptops have a battery backup for the non-volatile memory that is used to store the motherboard bios (aka, cmos). Those batteries last for several years as a general rule but do eventually die. Form time to time I’ve heard of situations where this causes apparently inexplicable problems - even where a computer is continuously connected to a live outlet - as opposed to a power strip that gets switched off with the computer.
Logically, that shouldn’t happen, but motherboard design isn’t always a question of logic, so IDK.
Does anyone know if laptops have those little onboard batteries - usually a 3volt, lithium CR2032.
The BIOS battery failing would not give such results. You’d get a message about the CMOS on boot-up.
Your USB DVD drive should work if the BIOS supports it, but you should be able to boot off a USB stick in any case. Is there any data on the laptop that hasn’t been backed up? Do you have the application install sets? Do you have the XP license key? If all is well on those fronts, get yourself an XP CD and do an over-the-top install.
Given what you describe, I could probably (almost certainly) fix it, and so could any professional, if you don’t care about any info on it. It sounds like there are no hardware issues. Just Winblows issues. Unfortunately, given the machine you describe, it won’t be worth the cost to have a pro do it. Someone like me would be willing to buy it from you as-is for about 20 bucks, because I would be able to make it work for my own use. Find a used computer place that buys and sells “junkers”, and get your 10 or 20 bucks, then use that to buy a newer used one, possibly from the same place. I would have to actually have the thing here to play with, to figure out what’s actually wrong with it. Then, of course, I’d charge you 20 bucks an hour for my time :).
[No, I’m not offering to buy it. Unless you live within easy driving distance from me, it’s probably not worth the cost for me to have you ship it here, and I don’t need it anyway. This one I’m posting from is just fine… :)]
If you do decide to throw it away, I, unlike CH, wouldn’t mind having an older laptop to monkey with. It beats a P3 desktop with Puppy Linux.
But I do think it is likely you can fix it yourself if you can get your hands on a Windows XP Media Center Edition install CD. It’s only if a repair install doesn’t fix it that you might want to look into getting rid of it.
If you’re just using it for Web stuff, why not pop Ubuntu Netbook edition, or similar, onto it from a USB stick. Seems like it should do the job without further outlay. And if you get stuck, you could take it down your local Linux Users Group (LUG) and ask for some help. You’d pretty much get professional assistance for free.
OK, so I’m posting from the laptop with Ubuntu now. I accidentally installed the i386 version on this AMD machine- will that make any difference? A few issues aside, it seems to be working fine. I did a deep fsck scan and the hard drive appears to be fine.
The few problems:
When I bring it out of suspend, the mouse doesn’t work, I have to restart.
Even though the box is checked, the touchpad is not disabled when I’m typing.
VPN does not work- it says the connection failed because the VPN service failed to start.
Password recognition is sketchy, sometimes I have to type the password 10 times or more when making a change. I know for sure I am typing it right but it says I’m not.
A bunch of little annoyances, like the startup sound plays even though the box is not checked. Stuff like that, not a big deal but annoying.
The i386 version is the safe version–it will run on any system. But you are probably having driver issues with everything else, so trying the 64-bit version might work better just for getting different drivers.
One idea I can give you is that you might be able to get the mouse to work again by restarting X, instead of restarting all of Ubuntu. CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE is your friend.
The other is to contact support. Ubuntu has great support forums. Chances are you can fix those annoyances on the command line or something.