Web browser will not load web pages, please help.

Factual Questions
1

After trying to clean up my HP laptop, (deleting many files as suggested by various websites) chrome won’t load any web pages at all and IE crashes after trying to load it’s home page. I’m running windows 7 home premium 32bit with no firewall or antivirus running.

I have other issues as well, such as explorer.exe randomly restarting itself, Microsoft visual c ++ errors, and no way of accessing my network and sharing center.

These other issues all occurred before the browser issue, and as expected I’ve researched over and over again trying to solve these problems. I’m using my iPod touch for Internet, which only goes so far. I have no backups on my laptop and can’t restore it before everything happened.

I’m also wondering if there’s a way of just reverting win7 back to factory settings? Though my laptop was running vista, pre-installed, and was upgraded to 7 a while ago.

I really don’t know what to do… What should I do?

2

“deleting many files as suggested by various websites” sounds ominous to me… there are a lot of websites out there with terrible information.

The biggest problem you have right now is that you have no backups, so the absolute first thing you should do is back-up the computer. There are various ways of doing this, although not having a working web browser is going to make it a bit more complex. The most reliable way for your computer might be to simple back up your files onto USB memory sticks, but that might not be feasible depending on how much you need to back up.

After that, I’d recommend wiping the HD and installing a fresh copy of Windows 7. Get a friend to help with this if you haven’t done it before. Hopefully whoever upgraded you to Windows 7 used a legal, licensed copy-- in which case reinstalling will be a breeze.

Once you have a fresh copy of Windows 7, restore your backed-up items.