I would have posted this days ago, but I hate asking for help, but I’ve had the flu for almost 2 weeks, and my laptop is really screwed up, and it’s kinda my life, especially during this quarantine and all this free time.
I’ve done all the scandisks, windows defender, anti-virus and it all comes clean. I’ve tried to do a Recovery, but it keeps failing, and its screwed up search settings and other things I’ll hold off for another time. I’ve uninstalled programs, resets browsers, cache, cookies (so many password, ugh) defrag, optimize, disk cleanup.
It’s odd how I can’t play a song on winamp (it keeps freezing, sometimes for a short while, sometimes for a really long time where I have to restart), which takes no RAM, and the videos that I have on my desktop for example, yet… videos work much better on YouTube. It was always the other way around, because of my slow internet connection. I can’t even play a simple game like Age of Empires II, which I’ve had for many years.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. I don’t have the resources (or even a debit card) to find some sophisticated program online, so if you know something, I’d be very thankful in this very stressing time for me. Thanks!
“Screwed up search settings” is often an indicator of a virus. Rootkit-type viral infections can persist after a cleaning and/or trick AV into thinking everything is fine. When this happens the “Professional” solution is to reinstall windows and start over. It’s not that it’s impossible to remove rootkits with AV. It’s that it’s impossible to be sure you got them all; viruses often come in packs. It’s also usually faster to reinstall & update than to spend hours & hours fighting it.
If it isn’t a virus and online content is working well but stuff saved on the hard drive isn’t it’s likely either Windows corruption, hard drive corruption, or both. You could try using system file checker:
(On Windows 10)
Right-click Start button in lower left corner then click Command Prompt (Admin) then type the following command in the black box and press enter:
sfc /scannow
And then wait while it tries to fix it. Often it can’t but it doesn’t hurt to try. If it works you should eventually see a message similar to “SFC has made corrections to the system.”
If SFC doesn’t fix it then again, re-installation is your best bet.
My advice is to buy a large-ish USB drive and copy all of your personal stuff to it as a backup. Then, if you can, either revert your laptop back to factory settings or reinstall Windows from scratch.
I tried to run Scanreg by restarting and holding CTRL, but it just restarted as usual. I’m sure I’ve done a System File Checker, as well as everyone available. I’ll keep trying. Thanks.
That is almost guaranteed to be malware of some sort. 100% guaranteed if you start task manager and it gets shut down too. Right-Click on the menu bar and select task manager. There’s so much background stuff running on W10 that you probably wouldn’t recognize an unauthorized app running but just see if it immediately closes when launched.
If it does the next thing I would do would be to boot into safe mode and install an antivirus app to scan with.
I tried, while hitting down CTRL while it restarted and did nothing. I tried installing AVAST, and it seems I can’t do a boot scan with this free version. But thanks.
I’ve had Windows Defender on, and have done all I could there.
But, I finally got Avast to boot scan, it’s been going on for a few hours, but there are files that are being classified as corrupt, and sent to the Chest, so hopefully I can delete them when it restarts (hopefully they won’t ask me to upgrade).
It doesn’t even have a drive! I think they figure “Why would anyone need this anymore”… I remember in the 2000s, there was ALWAYS a recovery disk, and anytime it went bad, I’d stick it in the Compaq Presario, and it was brand new again, but they stopped that, and want to make things impossible or exclusive only to one company. I really can’t stand new things, because they aren’t better. They might look better, but its always slower, complicated, prone to error, etc.
Portable hard drives have gotten cheaper with more space (a 1TB drive is pretty standard now and only $50, 2TB is $70).
But if you’re only backing up what you really need, you might be surprised how cheap “thumb drives” have gotten. There are always deals at Best Buy, but the best bet is an office supply store.
I finally got the Avast boot-up scan. Took 3 hours, and it got rid of the infected files, but no difference. Even when I clicked on my SD link, I got “An error occurred during a connection to boards.straightdope.com. PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR”
I think I’m going to do another scan - I can’t do much on here.
That error might oddly enough, be caused by Avast. There’s some troubleshooting and fixing info here. Sounds like the low-hanging fruit fix is to create a new profile and copy over your favorites.