Over the past few days I’ve been having some computer problems. My Microsoft Vista Laptop has been having trouble starting properly. The computer will boot up, then prompt me for my password. But after the main desktop shows up and begins to load the programs in the bottom right of the screen and the gadgets on the sidebar, the computer would stop loading. The little light that says whether or not the hard disk is being accessed would blink every 10 seconds or so, but it wouldn’t do any real work. When I would click on the “Start” button, nothing would happen, and I’d be lucky if I’d get the spinning blue circle thingy to pop up. So my computer was just hanging there and I tried pushing my power button but nothing worked. DISCLAIMER – I AM NOT GIVING YOU ADVICE ON WHAT TO DO WITH YOUR COMPUTER I AM JUST TELLING A STORY ABOUT MY COMPUTER. IF YOU FOLLOW ANY OF THE STEPS THAT ARE PRESENTED IN THIS ARTICLE BY READING THIS YOU HEREBY ACCEPT THAT YOU DO SO AT YOUR OWN RISK.
So then I unplugged my laptop, shut it, then removed the battery. This does a rather unpleasant shut down for the computer, but it was all I knew how to do to shut it down. Then the next day I talked to this cool girl at my Starbucks and she said that I could just hold down the power button on my laptop and if I held it long enough it would power down. So I tried it her way and it worked! So when I restarted the computer I was prompted with the option of safe mode, or a bunch of other options. I decided to use safe mode. I wasn’t exactly sure what the problem was, so I did a virus scan. The virus scan said that I had a few viruses in my email and that it took care of them but I wasn’t satisfied that that was the only problem. I also ran the disk defragmenter program and disk cleanup. The whole process took a long time and I remember eating a lot of watermelon while waiting. I also deleted Skype from my computer because that was the last program I installed before I had my problem. So I restarted my computer and things booted normally and I thought the computer was fixed.
Then a few restarts and one day later the same problem happened again and I wasn’t able to finish loading up my computer. I was perturbed but I didn’t give up. So this time I restarted the computer and went into safe mode again. I tried running Windows Update, to see if I was missing any drivers. The reason why I did this was because I ran this one Widows diagnostic program, (I can’t remember what program it was that did this) and it said I was having driver issues. But when I tried running Windows Update in safe mode nothing happened, even though I had networking enabled. So then I read that if I held F8 while booting the computer I would be presented with advanced booting options. So I restarted the computer and held down F8 but my computer wouldn’t get past the first screen. So then I let go of F8 and passed the screen, and then held it down again. Then I was prompted with the Advanced Boot Options screen. I then chose the option of “Restart the Computer with the Last known Good Configuration.” That at least got my computer to boot. But then I remembered that I tried that once before and that was only a temporary fix to my problem. So I tried running Windows Update. It took a little while but I downloaded 5 updates to my computer, 2 Important Updates and 3 Optional Updates that related to system drivers.
I restarted my computer with the new updates and it loaded up the desktop about twice as fast as usual and now I’m able to write this blog post so I guess it worked.
-Tyler