Dell Laptop HELL

[Brandons]

heres the story

last night my friend came over with his laptop, he had spent $300 canadian on new parts for it (32mb vid card, previous one is 16mb) and 512mb of DDR ram (previous ram was 256mb). We sucessfully installed all the parts.

So we started it up with the new stuff, loaded windows just fine! Anyways, i had files on his drive that i needed because i didnt want to download them again, so i went to copy them (through the network) and found he had the jeefo virus, of course my computer being formatted after having over 200 infected files, i knew it would need to be formatted to completely fix this problem.

Well we restarted the laptop, because i just installed the video card drivers, which actually didnt install (stupid drivers..), and found windows was corrupted (i guess jeefo goes nuts when its scanned for viruses).

Now ive been in the process of reinstalling windows, which installed once, but the dvd rom was very picky with what it would load. So i formatted again, and it wont even install windows without giving me a critical error (by this time now its been formatted around 5 times, with windows setup re-installed). I continued to try and try, with only failure. So it came to this, since the critical error seems to come from the video card (new hardware) i removed the new one and put the old one back in, heh, might as well get windows on the possesed thing.

Now its installing windows xp pro, and it seems to be working, but i think theres more trouble to come.. nothings this easy for me.

Well thats how i wasted 6 hours last night and 3 this morning.

 

[Howard]

Learn from the lesson and run a good anti-virus program. If you are getting errors installing windows then that is asure sign of faulty ram. Believe me been there and got the t-shirt. Put the original ram back in and try again.

Here is the jeefo information http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.jeefo.html

 

[Brandons]

Yeah, i usually have a virus scanner, and in fact was looking for one, i just install my friends norton 2002.

My friend who owns the laptop, his subsciption thing ended a year ago, so he didnt detect it.

I put the old vid card in, and windows actually installed and everything. But it still gets critical errors, which makes me think, the ram is shot, so i will tell my friend to call up dell and figure it out. hell even now i cant get into the user thing in control panel!

Anyways, its just setup for now so he has something to use to get his homework done, ive got his work backed up on my pc, so if anything does happen, its repairable.

Thanks for the help, i never thought ram could cause problems...

 

[bigred93explrer]

if you are loading xp now the first thing you will want to do is go and download the patches for it. you are automatically going to be infected with the blaster worm virus. It will infect you as soon as you connect to the internet. It is sent through the RPC in the OS and will infect you. There are a bunch of critical updates for xp

 

[Brandons]

Yeah i always run the windows update to install the blaster worm patch, first thing i do, after that i run the blaster fix to check and dispose of it, then finish with the rest of the updates.

As for virus scanners, i have norton set to update the definitions every day or something like that.

My friend already picked up his laptop, were still going to work out the bugs, and the ram is definately defective, cd drive has problems loading some stuff, and when i get the blue screen of death, it shows "dumping physical memory" at the end of the error. He is going to call up dell and figure the ram problem out. Other then that, its all working good.

Thanks for the tips guys.

 

[scawtiedog]

I had the same problem with a friend's laptop and it ended up not being the memory that was bad, but the memory slot on the motherboard that was bad (meaning the motherboard that was shot). Have you taken out the memory and put in the old memory to see if it fixes the problem? If you did, and you still have the problem, go to my website - http://home.comcast.net/~davis_scott/index.htm - and download on "Diagnostics.zip" under the Latest Updates. Unzip the file and put its contents on a floppy disk. Then restart the computer with the disk in and it should bring up a diagnostics program. Run all of the memory tests on there and it will locate what memory block is bad. If it reads the same for both sets of memory (old and new) then it means the motherboard is shot. Hope this helps!

 

[JoshC]

You should also turn on the Windows firewall BEFORE you get on the net. For some reason Windows decided to default it to OFF, so turn it on that way you don't get the Trojan virus.