My computer is so broken

This is more of a curisoity than anything, as I'll be replacing this computer soon. But the other day, my 6-year old hp pavilion zv5000 finally died--almost. My mom gave it to me a little less than a year ago, and I wiped the hard drive and re-installed everything. It's worked alright up till now too. But when I turn it on, I get the blue screen of death unless I start it up without my external hard drive plugged up, which never happened before. When it starts up and logs me on, I don't have any desktop icons or my start menu or anything. So I do ctrl+alt+del, and then "new task". If I type in "explorer.exe" or "explorer" it says it can't find the file. So I try to manually start my standard Internet browser from there, Google Chrome. It says that the pages aren't responding, and asks to kill them or wait. And never loads. So I tried installing Firefox, which worked for one day, and then wouldn't connect to the Internet anymore. And now when I try to start it from the ctrl+alt+del menu nothing happens at all. But somehow, I can still use this computer's outdated version of Internet Explorer, which is how I'm managing to type this post. I know my computer is quite broken and not worth fixing...since I'm starting college next year I need a new computer anyway, I'll just be getting it Christmas instead of summer. I just want to know...what on earth could have gone wrong with my computer to cause this problem? And how can I prevent it from happening to my next computer? I'm awful with technology and seem to have bad luck with computers...

 

virus infected explorer.exe highly possible or virus infection in general. BSOD means you are able to boot into windows as BSOD is a windows operating system failure screen.
in your case, possible that if the system does not recognize similar state as before it crashes, so possible somehow the operating system driver management thing got screwed all over
looks more like a virus than harddrive corruption nonetheless

 

Dude, I just had mine fixed...almost 1 week no internet...Motherboard just died...Bought new motherboard, new fan, new hard drive, completely erased everything, reinstalled windows (from a disk, not pre-loaded) and removed demonratic "green" powersave...now all 3 of my fans are always on...I am not buying another HP pc, and would not recommend anyone doing that, unless you are willing to spend some cash on ALIENWARE pc...Instead, I'll be building one, buying proffessional grade parts...and maybe some liquid cooling...

 

Get a Dell Optiplex. Enterprise grade, with 3 years of on site warranty!

 

It sounds like something is hijacking your session. Try downloading HijackThis (HijackThis - Trend Micro USA) and see if that works for you. If you're unsure of how to use, just paste your scan log at hijackthis.de.

 

Dell hardware is crap as we just got rid of them from the NYC contracts as they have entirely way to many hardware issues.

 

get a MAC!!!!

 

Rusty, do a full format and just reinstall windows.

 

I agree as your operating system appears to have been compromised by malware

Sent from my EVO4G using tapatalk

 

I might do that, but my parents said they'd get me a new laptop for Christmas, since I need one for college anyway. We've been looking at Asus computers, as well as Toshibas. I really don't know much about computers, but I've heard Toshibas are good, as well as Asus. I am certainly not buying another hp, this computer has always been slow and generally awful. Of course, one of our other computers also decided to crash, something went wrong with the hard drive. So now we just have one laptop, and mine which is (so far) still kinda working.

 

ASUS... i've had bad experience with them and wonky software with their hardware, also same with Acer but on a magnitudinal scale lol
Toshibas... they tend to have very hot power bricks that can burn

For what purposes do you use your laptop for? then i can probably shortlist some for you, give me a budget too. You may even be better off buying a laptop and a netbook for college.
I can definitely answer any questions you got in terms of a computer scientist and a computer enthusiast point of views.

 

Really? What machines were you using and what were the issues? I have heard of other companies, too, changing their contracts over to HP/Lenovo etc. from Dell.

 

it seems alot of internet security "free" downloads from cnet are causing problems (@ least for me). I had a hijacker virus and had to completely reinstall windows although it sounds like u may be having a more complicated problem.

just a heads up about the "free downloads" from cnet. Especially the security software. some are almost impossible to completely uninstall.

 

i recommend actually paying for an internet security package, its better and safer in the long run and usually catches more malware. I use kaspersky internet security myself for the past few years and also installed em to all my family's machines and recommended it to my friends. always stock em when theyre on sale for 19.99 for 1 year/3 pcs lol

 

Just download Microsofts Security Essentials which is free and works flawlessly .

 

Really for everyone, nothing wrong with just formatting your hard drive and re-doing the whole thing at least once a year. Doesn't take that long, and you'll be amazing how much faster it'll be afterwards.

 

It will mostly be used for college. But other than that I watch a lot of videos on my computer, either on the Internet or stuff I've downloaded. I download stuff off the Internet fairly often as well. As far as price...stuff we've looked at has been in the $650ish range, so something around there. I hate waiting on stuff to load, this computer has been a test of my patience with its 1.5 GB of RAM. A decent sized internal memory is also important...but I do have a 1 TB external hard drive that I use and its only like 20% full right now. Oh. And it needs to be durable, because I tend to be kinda rough on technology.

That's mostly all I use my computer for...thanks in advance for any assistance!

EDIT. I think I might wipe my hard drive and start everything over again on this computer, if I get time. How exactly do I go about doing that?

 

The Optiplex series several issues ranging from defective systemboards ,hard drives and a host of other things. Like continually screwing up our custom images. That is what we did exactly . We went to HP and Lenovo

 

despite popular belief,
reformatting every year isn't required to have your system in tip top conditions especially with the newer generation operating systems.

Let me go through a few things (ok well its long haha) on this topic for a general fyi in normal terms

What is formatting?
Writing of the file system to the hard drive for usage with the operating system.

What is a file system?
The thing that allows the operating system and applications to sort/access/write data to and from the hard drive.

whats the differences between quick format and a normal format in windows?
Quick format, you wipe the master tables of the files, but the files are physically still there.
Normal format will usually write 0s into all sectors thus you begin with a full blank hard drive in most cases

So what should I do when I want to completely erase all traces of my data?
Multiple writes over all sectors with 0s, thus performing the formatting a few times

What bottlenecks a computer in modern day systems?
The hard drive as its mechanical, thus the higher the RPM and higher the cache, usually means better performance. Thus we have Solid State Harddrive rolling in hot that decreases the access/transfer times.

the heirachy of speed in your computer are as follows:
L1 cache
L2 cache
L3 cache
RAM
..... and on a uber high magnitude we have hard drive.

the CPU caches have different sizes to optimize between speed and efficiency. This also applies to file systems on sector sizes and such (when you format you see these options). If you handle large files most of the time, a large sector size will be beneficial as it will decrease the amount time required to pull the file if we consider a simple method of 1 sector/per access, for example a 10MB file will only require 1 access if your sector size is 10MB but 10 times if its 1MB (and this an unrealistic example but just an example to illustrate the idea) It also alters the amount of sectors a file will take thus sometimes you will actually see more space used if you push your sector size high with small files.


How does accessing the hard drive work?
So the CPU sends queues to the hard drive controller which then tells the hard drive whats needed then caches then data transfers over in reverse order and loaded into RAM then the CPU can pull from RAM (virtual addresses are used) The queues are always coming to the hard drive as the operating system "predicts" whats the next sectors you're going to access. Thus when you play videos, it actually gets smoother after the first few secs as the video gets buffered into ram.

So what really slows down my computer after using it for a while?
When your hard drive is fresh, its fast because all your files are sequential. However as you delete, you will be creating blank spaces in the sequence of files. The blank space may not be enough to store the new file thus only part of it is stored there and the rest is at the end. This is the idea of fragmentation and thus we have Defraggers to reorder the files thus allowing faster access times as your files are in sequence.
Do note that some file systems are better than others in terms fragmentations because of how their master tables work and how they point to files. *nix file systems are prone to not fragment as much, ie REISERFS, EXT4, etc thus they do not bundle with a defragger usually.
Also Solid state hard drives do not require defragmentation because they are not mechanical.

How can I make my computer faster? (especially laptops)
Change your hard drive for one with higher cache and higher RPM. You will be able to access/read/write files faster. Think of the hard drive cache as the buffer for data when reading and writing.

Why do I see 2 hard drives in My Computer but I only have 1?
You are able to partition hard drive to multiple "logical" hard drives and with different file system in each, it simply tells the master tables that cylinder 0-X is A and X-end is B. However, this in my honest opinion creates a few problems if you're seeking performance because you are still having to jump around and with more mechanical movements if the other logical drive is on the outer rim of the drive while the operating system is in the inner. Read/Write times are also not linear throughout mechanical harddrives, its actually faster closer to the inner than the outer.


So why is my Operating system still slow after defragmentation?
After you install stuff, you can sometimes defragment even the operating system files especialyl when they go through updates and such. However its usually due to excessive things left in the registry and extra lines of attributes that it has to go through. The best thing is to have a list of must haves then dont install more crap that you dont need especially when some of them are real bad at cleaning after themselves. Some software have update software thats also there even after uninstalling, possibly you could be wasting cpu cycles running it at start up for it to find that you dont have the software anymore as well.

I must start fresh, what is a good strategy as opposed to reformatting?
Create an image of a "good" state of your hard drive and everytime you screw up, you reload that "good" state thus shortening the time required to go through all the drivers install and windows install.

Wait, I actually got a virus, can i not reformat?
Well you can, but what you should do is run a full scan on the hard drive first as viruses sometimes just infect say .exe files or operating system files. So you can simply get it cleaned and then just reinstall windows without wiping your other files. Reinstall windows will only wipe your C:/Windows (depending on what version of Windows and what letter you assigned) and all the other files will remain, to regain access to files that are permission locked under Users (for windows vista+) you simply need to boot into safe mode and change the permissions to allow the new administrator.

Is Windows Defragger good?
It does it job, what I personally use is PerfectDisk. It defrags my hard drives while it goes into screensaver/when im not using. This keeps yourself from lengthy defrags in the long run.

Anymore questions/corrections feel free to post, its what I can remember off the top of my head from my 3rd year hardware and OS course and personal experience. I also use Macs, Windows, Linux, and Unix.

 

Do you play computer games? if you dont, that range should have a lot of choices. and to reinstall the OS on your HP, it should of came with some recovery disks, pop those in and then follow instructions. Tell it to do a full restore/full wipe.
If you want to recover some files on the machine, you can download something like Ubuntu livecd to run linux off ram disk and cd and back up the files into an external.

(I run around 7TB of hdds on my file server and 5TB or so in my main desktop with like 1/2 dozen externals lying around and my desktop always have less than 10% free space LOL)