gizmo Posted September 24, 2009 Share Posted September 24, 2009 I was fortunate enough to get a new (to me) computer, and relegate my old gateway to my son. But there's a weird problem with the damn thing. When you boot up (Vista), it gets to the pitch black screen right before your start page appears... and then nothing for like three minutes. Every time I start up or reboot. It sucks! At first, I thought there was something wrong with windows, so I inserted my Vista CD and tried to do a repair. It took it 35 minutes to do a 5 minute repair. It took almost 10 minutes for the "what country do you live in" box to appear, and that's the first box! So I thought it was the hard drive. I go buy a new one and install it. I try to install Vista... I get the same slow-ass installation problem! So I'm thinking it's the motherboard, but the computer works perfectly fine as long as you never shut it off. What do y'all think? It was made January 2007. Also, I have a REALLY old 733 mhz no-name laptop that my daughter uses. She got some nasty ass piece of spyware on it that masqueraded as a anti-virus program. Problem was it removed the start menu, the task bar, the control panel, the task manager... everything you needed to remove the sucker. Oh, and it shut off all your desktop icons. So I go to reinstall XP. But it gives me error code 4 on loading some sys file. So I do a net search, and it says it's something to do with reseating your RAM and making sure the RAM is clocked correctly in the BIOS. This BIOS doesn't have a setting for adjusting RAM speed, so I open it up and reseat the RAM. Now the damn thing will do the initial start (where you can select to go into BIOS) but freezes when it starts to load. I can't choose safe mode, hell, I can't even get into BIOS anymore. I honestly can't see how removing and plugging back in two sticks of RAM blew up the computer! Any ideas? This post is really making me look computer-stupid, and I swear I'm not! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
recoverymouse Posted September 24, 2009 Share Posted September 24, 2009 what happens when you turn on your vista computer in safe mode? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
celestia Posted September 24, 2009 Share Posted September 24, 2009 That sucks! I don't know. I have a Gateway running Vista that's older than yours and I haven't had that problem (yet...x'ing fingers). You would be the one I would ask... Hope you get it figured out. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gizmo Posted September 25, 2009 Author Share Posted September 25, 2009 what happens when you turn on your vista computer in safe mode? First off, I have to clarify. I did a radical update to the old gateway before giving it to my son. When I timed the boot speed this afternoon, the "black screen of death" only lasted 55 seconds instead of the 3 minutes I stated before. That is used to take when I had the computer. Anyway, I booted in safe mode and it stayed loading crcdisk.sys for approximately 1 minute, then went to the normal startup screen. I don't know if this is because it is really stuck on that file, or simply it is the last file Vista loads, and thus the safe mode equivalent of the "black screen of death". So, they basically loaded in about the same time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Velvet Elvis Posted September 25, 2009 Share Posted September 25, 2009 http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download That should fix all your problems. At least try the live CD out to check if you have hardware problems. If you can run a linux live CD with no problems you know it's a windows problem and not a hardware problem. Ditto with the old XP machine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gizmo Posted September 25, 2009 Author Share Posted September 25, 2009 http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download That should fix all your problems. At least try the live CD out to check if you have hardware problems. If you can run a linux live CD with no problems you know it's a windows problem and not a hardware problem. Ditto with the old XP machine. I'll try it out on the gateway to see if it's a windows problem... the one thing that gets me is why did it act the same way (taking 10 minutes to load up the first screen of the windows installation program from a clean disc) on a pristine new hard drive if it's a software problem? I can't even get to the screen where you boot to a CD on my old XP machine, so no good there. I'm thinking it's toast. It just pisses me off that it worked perfectly before the damn daughter had to search for "cooking games" on the net and downloaded a nasty piece of spyware. Then it just castcaded to crap from there. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Velvet Elvis Posted September 25, 2009 Share Posted September 25, 2009 http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download That should fix all your problems. At least try the live CD out to check if you have hardware problems. If you can run a linux live CD with no problems you know it's a windows problem and not a hardware problem. Ditto with the old XP machine. I'll try it out on the gateway to see if it's a windows problem... the one thing that gets me is why did it act the same way (taking 10 minutes to load up the first screen of the windows installation program from a clean disc) on a pristine new hard drive if it's a software problem? I can't even get to the screen where you boot to a CD on my old XP machine, so no good there. I'm thinking it's toast. It just pisses me off that it worked perfectly before the damn daughter had to search for "cooking games" on the net and downloaded a nasty piece of spyware. Then it just castcaded to crap from there. It sounds like the boot loader has been fucked up. You should be able to set the boot order in the BIOS so it looks to the CD drive before it looks to the hard drive for a boot device. Nothing that's ever happened on the hard drive should be able to effect that. If you can get to the BIOS setup stuff you should be able to boot to a CD. If it boots to a CD before it reads the MBR on the hard drive it might be fine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
recoverymouse Posted September 25, 2009 Share Posted September 25, 2009 I did a search for crcdisk.sysand found a ton of posts by people with exactly the same problem. Didn't have time to find a solution that applies. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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