About a month ago when I cold booted my mostly-stock Gateway DX441S desktop PC, an error came up saying that it couldn't find the operating system (a retail copy of Vista 32, no SP), so I ran system restore and it started up. The problem is that almost nothing works. Usually when I boot it up, the sound is not working and says "No audio device is installed" and the Sound, video, and game controllers subgroup is missing from Device Manager. I run onboard sound from an intel mobo. Also, while the PC is capable of reading and writing data to the hard drive (WD5000AAKS), it doesn't show up in disk management or when attempting to clean install windows 7, and western digital's driver installer "stops working" whenever I attempt to run it. I am no longer able to access the BIOS from startup. Additionally, Google Chrome no longer works, and all my other browsers are infected with some kind of search engine adware that will divert from google, ask, and yahoo links. McAffee and AVG can't find whatever it is. I'm a pretty simple PC user, I just want it to surf the web, download and listen to music, and play Starcraft 2. I'm not ready to give up on this PC, but I have scoured the web looking for an answer that will fix even one of my problems and have been unable to find anything, as it appears I have a very unique set of issues. Thank you in advance for any help you may be able to provide.
