Good evening, first of all!
My girl friend's laptop has gone berserk. Windows Vista hangs whenever anyone tries to open windows explorer, control panel, msconfig, services.msc, and other administrative OS tools. Can't run Hijackthis also - it hangs.
We've tried shutting down unnecessary services, like the crap Asus installs on their pc's, several startup programs wich are unnecessary, like messenger, winamp agent and stuff like that, checked hard drive for errors to no avail, deactivated several windows services, like indexing without result.
The machine is an
ASUS F3SC-AP11C with Vista Home Premium.
I believe it may be the hard disk controller that has gone crazy, but vista doesn't let me reinstall the drivers - hangs everytime. Formatting is an option she doesn't want to consider, at least not without being able to backup a few things... but both usb ports and DVD recording software (nero express) freeze the machine. Anti-virus (AVG) and anti-spyware(Ad-aware) are up to date... and hang when running.
There are no error messages, the machine just turns unresponsive for a long tim, then applications crash. The OS loads ok, but then every attempt to read data simply makes system hang...
I need help. Does anyone have any idea or suggestion they could give me?