Joined
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3 Posts
Hi,
I'm afraid this will be quite the challenge, so allow me to wish you good luck in advance :grin: I'm on an ancient Fujitsu-Siemens laptop that someone lent me after my PC died. In the past few months I've seen errors of every size, shape and color, and I've tried to deal with them the best I could. I'm no expert, but I can handle minor to average problems. What goes on on this infernal machine though, is beyond anything I've ever experienced.
So, where to start ? Windows XP SP3 is installed and the person who owns the laptop gave me express instructions not to mess with the installation, meaning I can't do a format and re-install. He has tons of files on the hard drive and nowhere else to put them for now. I checked the Fujitsu support site and their newest drivers are from 2004... so I wouldn't have attempted a format either way. It's a friggin 7th hand laptop and nobody has the mainboard's CD.
Now I'll try to make a list of the issues that have been popping up these past few days, and the things I've done to try and solve them. I'm sure I won't remember everything, so please bear with me and I'll answer your questions in my following posts. These are the major annoyances:
1. I get a BSOD with 0x0000007E, every time I plug in the mouse. Even in safe mode. Other USB devices like an MP3 player, or flash card work fine. No question marks appear in device manager.
2. Every antivirus I've tried gets stuck at some point. I must have tried close to 10 and none of them managed to finish the scan. The furthest they've got was a file called vdtcjoub.sys, located in system32\drivers. It's an unsigned driver, I've googled it and got 0 results. Explorer freezes just when I select it. Clearly it's rotten.
I've tried various programs that were supposed to force it's deletion (KillBox, FileAssassin, file shredders), but they didn't do a thing, even with the delete on startup option enabled.
3. Programs stop responding after about an hour or so. Their processes show up in task manager, but they themselves are nowhere to be seen. Right now I can use Firefox because it was already started when whatever happened, happened. But if I double click on Winamp or a movie player, I can wait for hours and watch the grass grow. Sometimes they do show up, like over 30 minutes later, but if I open a movie, I get picture, but no sound.
For two days I used Avira Antivirus and the laptop behaved differently: worse. This event that occurs every hour, disabled Avira and caused a pop-up that went something like "services.exe ended unexpectedly with error code 1073741819. You have 60 seconds to save your bla bla until your computer restarts". Ok, that was the short version, I didn't write down the whole thing.
4. I used to have TONS more different problems, like the device manager showing up blank, sudden loss of audio (still happens sometimes), the laptop slowing down to a halt after less than 2 hours of use, reports of various critical files missing, etc... but I fixed most of these, and some fixed themselves (yeah, just like in Brazil).
I have several anti malware programs installed, they all helped with minor infections, but the system's still PURE TORTURE to use and I am stuck with it. I have to repair it the smart way, or stop using it. I wish I could format it or smash it to bits, Office Space style, but sadly that's not an option.
Now my head is spinning from the weeks of pain this machine has inflicted upon me, so I apologize again if I made this too long and forgot to mention vital information in the process. Thanks to anyone who even tries to figure this one out.
I'm afraid this will be quite the challenge, so allow me to wish you good luck in advance :grin: I'm on an ancient Fujitsu-Siemens laptop that someone lent me after my PC died. In the past few months I've seen errors of every size, shape and color, and I've tried to deal with them the best I could. I'm no expert, but I can handle minor to average problems. What goes on on this infernal machine though, is beyond anything I've ever experienced.
So, where to start ? Windows XP SP3 is installed and the person who owns the laptop gave me express instructions not to mess with the installation, meaning I can't do a format and re-install. He has tons of files on the hard drive and nowhere else to put them for now. I checked the Fujitsu support site and their newest drivers are from 2004... so I wouldn't have attempted a format either way. It's a friggin 7th hand laptop and nobody has the mainboard's CD.
Now I'll try to make a list of the issues that have been popping up these past few days, and the things I've done to try and solve them. I'm sure I won't remember everything, so please bear with me and I'll answer your questions in my following posts. These are the major annoyances:
1. I get a BSOD with 0x0000007E, every time I plug in the mouse. Even in safe mode. Other USB devices like an MP3 player, or flash card work fine. No question marks appear in device manager.
2. Every antivirus I've tried gets stuck at some point. I must have tried close to 10 and none of them managed to finish the scan. The furthest they've got was a file called vdtcjoub.sys, located in system32\drivers. It's an unsigned driver, I've googled it and got 0 results. Explorer freezes just when I select it. Clearly it's rotten.
I've tried various programs that were supposed to force it's deletion (KillBox, FileAssassin, file shredders), but they didn't do a thing, even with the delete on startup option enabled.
3. Programs stop responding after about an hour or so. Their processes show up in task manager, but they themselves are nowhere to be seen. Right now I can use Firefox because it was already started when whatever happened, happened. But if I double click on Winamp or a movie player, I can wait for hours and watch the grass grow. Sometimes they do show up, like over 30 minutes later, but if I open a movie, I get picture, but no sound.
For two days I used Avira Antivirus and the laptop behaved differently: worse. This event that occurs every hour, disabled Avira and caused a pop-up that went something like "services.exe ended unexpectedly with error code 1073741819. You have 60 seconds to save your bla bla until your computer restarts". Ok, that was the short version, I didn't write down the whole thing.
4. I used to have TONS more different problems, like the device manager showing up blank, sudden loss of audio (still happens sometimes), the laptop slowing down to a halt after less than 2 hours of use, reports of various critical files missing, etc... but I fixed most of these, and some fixed themselves (yeah, just like in Brazil).
I have several anti malware programs installed, they all helped with minor infections, but the system's still PURE TORTURE to use and I am stuck with it. I have to repair it the smart way, or stop using it. I wish I could format it or smash it to bits, Office Space style, but sadly that's not an option.
Now my head is spinning from the weeks of pain this machine has inflicted upon me, so I apologize again if I made this too long and forgot to mention vital information in the process. Thanks to anyone who even tries to figure this one out.
