Stupid... computer *kicks*

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A few months ago, our computer picked up a handful of viruses, one of which was the blaster worm. My father installed a Norton Internet Protection thing. But this, while it did detect and destroy the viruses, cut off our internet.

A few days ago, we had a computer repairer round, and he reinstalled the OS, and did loads of confusing stuff, and in the end, we have nothing.

The games and such are installed, but the directory doesn't know they're there. So we were told by the PC man, that we should just reinstall the games into exactly the same files they were in before.

I just reinstalled NWN, which is the only game I really wanted to get back, because ALFA is fun, and I've missed so much. Reading about it on the forums isn't fun.

Anyway, NWN installed, and I reinstalled SoU as well. Found out that I needed v 1.32 to play, so I completely updated from 1.30. And NwN runs so incredible slowly, litterally, you know that the light glows around the buttons when the mouse goes over them? Well theres something like a 40 second delay, and its the same on the internet, when I play playing online.

I don't think its anything to do with the internet, we have broadband, and before the PC crashed, I coudl always rely on fast loading times and such, between areas.

But now, the game is so slow when I try logging into DD. I can't do anywathing, its the same on all the servers I tried to log into. The screen is jumpy, and theres a huge delay between selecting actions and them being performed. I'm not sure if this is the same with all the games, or just NwN.

The internet on its own runs fine, its just with games, I can go on forums and stuff fine.

baring in mind, that when I say everything was mucked up, I mean everything, stuff like Java and that aswell. Could the lack of prgrames that a normal computer should have be something to do with it? Like Java script and stuff?

 

You may have a problem with the drivers for your graphics card. If your OS was completely reinstalled (Which OS is it, btw?), then you may need to update those drivers.

I, for one, had to update the drivers for my Nvidia card when I reinstalled WinXP, because the game was unplayably slow. After that, the game ran smoothly again.

[EDIT: By 'the game', I mean NWN v1.32]

 

I know enough about computers to know what part to hit with a hammer to make sure it is dead, but I do have a couple of ideas:

Do you have a graphics card? Is it installed, or is the computer trying to run off some cheesy graphics hub on the system board?

Check the graphics acceleration settings in "system"

Check the virtual memory settings

Check your RAM sticks. Does the computer detect the actual amt of RAM on the board?

If none of these work, I can send you a deck of cards!

edit: just saw the previous post...yeah check drivers, too

 

Personal experience tells me that your Hard Drive is pushing up daisies, well badly damaged anyways.
But first check the drivers and stuff.

 

okay, I'll get my Dad to fiddle with the PC a bit, I have a feeling it my be the graphics card.

The computers OS is WindowsXP Home edition btw.

 

If you have lost all of your data allready, I would just completely format your hard drive and start again with a clean install, otherwise your in for a *lot* of hassle, believe me.

Then I would make sure you ge some software to keep your hard-drive in check, get something you can do an image check with, and also get ghost image writer.

Making an image of a clean install, with the correct drivers installed and little else is very handy, and will save you a lot of time if you have to re-install again.

Partition your hard-drive to make your c drive (with Windows) only for windows, so that you can copy things you want to keep out to another drive, and format your partitions piece by piece, and then put back the image of the clean install of windows.


If this all seems too daunting, *you can get software which will recover seemingly lost data from youir hard-drive* BUT that tech-support guy probably means that you can't do it, as you may of over-written a lot of the stuff allready.

 

XP isn't to kind to you when you ask to format it, Manus. Well atleast it didn't let me.
If that doesn't work I think removing the battery does the same thing, although this can be dangerous.

 

Back up critical stuff if ye can...
Then reformat your hdd (with a boot disc) and reinstall all. I had a similiar problem, and i am just recovering... My games run 20% faster, however.

 

XP actually seem impossible to reformat, atleast it is so in my experience. I had a corrupted Win98 installation on my computer I wanted to get rid off so I installed XP over it but XP didnt remove the corrupted 98 and was thus corrupted itself. There was no option at all to reformat the computer and completely empty the HD after that, I even lugged my box to the dude I bougth it from for him to fix it and he did manage to fix it, in a way but he too wasnt able to do a full reformat as the option just never comes up. He managed to clean my computer and make it run decently but since then it hasnt been all that well.

Is there anyone who has been able to completely reformat and empty a HD with XP on it?

 

Either clean it up with Partition Magic or format it with a Format.com (Win98SE install CD does wonders).

 

To format a system drive (almost with every OS) you must not do this from within the OS.

OS installations allow to format system drives - BUT only if started from as installation from boot - not from within running OS. Running OS (previous OS too) "holds" needed files on disk, e.g. these files must not be deleted, e.g. no format of system drive is allowed.

Third party utilities (some mentioned in previous posts) are able to format drives, change partitions, ... (Power Quest: Drive Image, Partition Magic; ...) - you can find tons of freeware and shareware utilities that can do that (BUT not from within running OS). But I do not use unknown utilities, if I can use a reliable one.

You can 'low level format' harddisk with some computer BIOSes - but beware this because, this deleted ALL partitions (not only system) and does not work with all hard drives.

If you have SCSI disks, you can use SCSI setup on SCSI controller if there is any to format drives.

But this all work only without booting to installed OS.

 

Yeah, Partition Magic should do it, DOS is even better but doesn't handle large drives.

The XP CD will work if your HDD is unformatted, but I guess it won't work properly if you allready have XP installed.

You can try to just delete the Windows partition in DOS, format it, and then re-install from there, but again, you can't do this if your partition is too big, which means resorting to third party software again.

Failing this, a very big magnet. If it doesn't wipe all the data when you wave it over the drive, try hitting it

 

To get new graphics drivers, check Windows Update. (Nvidia drivers can be downloaded from there at least, so I wouldn't be too surprised if you can get stuff there for other card types, as well)

Just adding something; Formatting the harddrive shouldn't be necessary. The 'PC repair guy' already reinstalled the OS, so that shouldn't really be the problem, either...

 

*kicks Faded in the head, it seems to be broken*
( Reinstalling the OS does only fix corrupted files )

CAn you make a XP boot disc? If you can, reformat your HDD with it.

(Start from the boot disc, run Format C: )

Can you start the computer from the install disc without going to windows install? If you can, you might run the format from the install CD.

 

I don't see why it wouldnt, unless you're on Win95 or something. When you go into FDisk it should ask you if you want to enable large disk support. Just say yes

 

@Taza: My posts are related to getting NWN to run on a reinstalled OS, and formatting the hard drive might be a bit overkill, so I don't really see the point of your remark. Furthermore, you should be careful not to kick someone in the head, as you might sprain your ankle or something nasty like that.

 

@Frostbite:
I wouldn't jump the gun and reformat your machine. It's almost certainly a driver problem. Attempting to run games without your video drivers installed will result in extremely poor performance.

Also, if ever you suspect something is wrong with your hard disk, don't freak out and format the drive. Just run a scandisk and check for bad sectors. From there you can determine if the drive needs formatting / replacement.

@People having trouble installing WinXP:

Go into your bios, and set the boot order of the CD drive to before the HDD. Then just leave the XP disc in the drive and restart the machine. If your bios is too old to allow CD booting, there's a program available from the Microsoft site that will help you create a 4 or 6 disc set (I can't rememember which) which will allow you to start the install process.

If your machine has just had WinXP reinstalled, remember to visit windowsupdate.microsoft.com to patch it up. Without the RPC patch, blaster can hit pretty quickly. Last time I formatted my machine I was connected to the internet for 15 minutes before blaster hit me. Was looking for a driver and hadn't patched yet ><

@Manus:

1. XP CD install works just as well on formatted / dirty drives as clean ones.
2. FDISK works fine on large drives.

@Taza:

Just use the XP CD. You can format once the install program has started.

 

First off, yes, it is possible to reformat in XP. How? I don't know, I had a friend who works on computers do it for me.
And when he did, lo and behold, some of my games and programs worked really slow.
The solution? When windows was reinstalled, and I reinstalled all my software, there was a lot of stuff running in the background and taking up my systems resources. So I did a start>run>msconfig Went to the startup tab, and unchecked a lot of things that were running in the background. Got a ton of speed back, you'd be surprised. You may have to play around with what you uncheck, especially if you've upgraded things. But I'd try that first before you do any more reformating or reinstalling of an operating systems.

 

Hey my computer broke almost every day until I discovered antivirus software...

 

To anyone trying to reinstall XP, have you just tried putting in the XP cd, restarting, going to the BIOS and telling it to read from the CD first? I don't see why that wouldnt work.