Windows 8 Win 8 - Major Boo Boo - Someone Please Help!

[terazbox]

Happy Easter everyone!

I would so appreciate it if someone here could lend a helping hand.

Here's the scenario.

I have a laptop that came with Win 7 Home Premium. We got that reduced price version of Win 8 awhile back.

We had installed it on top of Win 7 and most everything had worked at that time except for one of the games and we really weren't sure if we liked it, so we ended up reverting back to Win 7.

Well, this easter weekend we got the notion to go ahead and reinstall Win 8 back on.

Thought everything had worked beautifully and we were just zipping along like happy bunnies.

Then, I remembered that I had forgotten to install a software program - which came on a CD.

That's when I discovered that there was supposedly a corrupted driver to the Slimtype Dvd and now..can't recognize CD's.

Husband says Win 7 should go back on but alas, I don't think there is a way to make it boot from my recovery discs.

I've seen all these driver updater things that say that they can find/fix drivers but I'm scared that since Win 8 thinks the driver is the best installed, and plus they cost money, and who knows if they are safe sites?

Well, anyhow..you get my brief picture. Lord, I think the husband will divorce me..was up most of the night researching and have such a confused head on where to turn next.

Can anyone help and what info would you need to help? I would even be willing to call anyone in the US - since we have unlimited long dist. - if someone can help.

Thanks so much!!!

 

[Trouble]

Ideally you'd want to have at a minimum the latest drivers available through the computer manufacturer's site..... But
you will need to know for instance which ones you actually need. Like for instance there's an Alps as well as a Synaptic touch pad driver, so yo would need to know which one you actually have on the machine. Device manager may help and it may not.
Likewise the Wireless LAN drivers you have a choice of Atheros or Ralink you need to determine which one before you can apply the appropriate driver

 

[terazbox]

just finished dinner and came back here.
already know we've got a syapitc and an atheros

loving the learning going on here, it is making me very happy and that makes the hubby happy.....

 

[terazbox]

Can I like say WOW!!!

It might not seem like much to you, but just for kicks, I went to my Bejeweled Blitz game on Facebook to see how the laptop would handle it. Usually, lag, freeze, slow, slow, slow and maybe, if I was real lucky a score of about 230,000 or so.

So, it updated the flash so that I could play and I just walked away with a score of 975,000 something!

I have never seen this laptop do something like that. The play was incredibly smooth and the mouse was super responsive to what I wanted it to do.

I am blown away!!!

You all helping me tweak and understand this stuff...well, I can not say how thankful I am to all of you and yet, there might be more things I still need to tweak but already, such a huge difference over anything I've ever seen it do.

I shall no longer be calling her a brat (or any other name not repeatable here)

Thanks so much - can't say it enough!!! You all Rock!!!!!

And without all of you helping out, I'd have probably never got the laptop to this type of operation.

 

[terazbox]

Well, now I am somewhat perplexed.

I decided to try installing another one of my software cds. The 1st one I did seemed really slow, but I didn't give it much thought.

This time though, I have to admit...kind of troubling.

I inserted the cd and it began the process but man, once it got to the part where it copies files...15 minutes or so.

That's never been normal for this laptop.

So, any suggestions? Things that I should look at or research?

Thanks again!!

And oh, my apologies...I know this topic started as a Windows 8 but since we yanked that off and went back to try reinstalling Win 7 and that's what we are currently working on, I know it doesn't fall under the Win 8 forum. Is that a major concern? I try to follow all the rules and regulations for any group or forum that I join and I feel really bad that this one switched gears. Let me know if I'm violating any policies please and I shall do my best to try correct that.

Thanks again all!

 

[Trouble]

Yes.
First stop and take a breath. And perform a manual defrag of your hard drive.
Start->All Programs->Accessories->System Tools-> Disk Defragmenter
That might take a while, let it run and complete
Then open Control Panel and in the top right corner click the View By: drop down and select small icons
Then click Windows Update.
Take some time and get your new install updated completely. You may have to go back a couple times to make sure all critical updates are installed.
Then defrag your hard drive again.
Then reboot and defrag you hard drive one more time.
You've installed a fair amount of stuff so you need to do a little TLC / Housekeeping. You might even want to consider hitting it with something like Ccleaner before the third defrag. You can grab the free version from piriform here Link Removed
Regards
Randy

 

[terazbox]

at the moment I am down to 2 updates, 1 for internet explorer 10 and 1 for the crazy bing bar thing.
Personally, I don't want Bing and I'm wondering if I should download IE10 or just let her ride with 9 for awhile?

Over the past several days, I've been slowly adding all the Windows updates. I had actually set it to not check for updates because I wanted to review each of them and download them in small groups and see how the laptop acted after each set. Man, there were a lot of them but I think it is was worth doing it slowly, in the end.

I actually had already planned on the housekeeping thing for Saturday, seeing that I'm down to just installing the Kodak software for the digital camera and a few other things. Plus, I need to set all of the favorites in IE again. Now, we always kept hubby's stuff in IE and mine in Google, but I haven't reinstalled google yet either.

I wanted to wait to do that until after the major housecleaning, that way I don't accidently delete the settings for the saved passwords for our sites.

I thought about the CCleaner but I also noticed that my Webroot product has similar items for the system. At any rate, that is all for tomorrow.

I did do a backup using NTI Backup that came with laptop and have noticed that after I ran that, the next few software items that installed from CD seemed to go a bit faster. Not sure if coincidence or just the type of files that were installing but I can definitely live with were we're at.

Very pleased actually, as she seems to be running much faster as far as connecting to internet and all. Much better than I think she ever did, to be honest.

Will check back in tomorrow, may have some questions on the housecleaning part...don't want to accidently delete anything that we need to keep.

Thanks again all!!!!!

 

[terazbox]

I'm setting the laptop to begin defragging while I clean and do laundry.
My question is - the other 2 drives listed - PQService and System Reserved, do I need to defrag them as well? I haven't touched them yet, just know they exist.
The PQ says that it is 3% fragmented and the system reserved says 0%.

Advice is much welcome and as always, very much appreciated!!

 

[Trouble]

My question is - the other 2 drives listed - PQService and System Reserved, do I need to defrag them as well?

No.
The 100 meg System Reserved partition is miniscule and will likely never show as fragmented.
The other is, I believe, your system recovery partition from the manufacturer and likely contains an image file in some format or other and generally speaking defragging a drive containing system images is not consider good practice.

 

[terazbox]

Wow,
we've suddenly developed all manner of problems with the laptop and I am not even sure where to start. Groan!
I thought we had everything going according to game plan. Had almost all of our software reinstalled and things were going great. Then, one night while using it - just checking Facebook and replies, boring stuff. It became very sluggish. Wasn't scrolling down through posts that I was reviewing very fast at all. When I was posting reply back on things, it was doing so very slowly. Then, at times, the Facebook page would get the message - unresponsive or not responding and then, come back. I thought the internet connection that night was bad, so didn't think anything of it.

Over the next few days, similar things would happen. Sluggishness, slow to respond to things, that slow spinning circle in the middle, would just hang there and took forever to kill a browser window. Slow to load pages, that sort of thing. Was checking for updates and that was going very slowly as well to download. Startup time became slower.
of
Loading photos from a camera card was very slow. The few games that I was playing, Bejeweled 3 - through the Wild Tangent and the solitaire game on Facebook were dragging, lagging, choppy. The sound was becoming distorted, I guess because of the lag?

I had things that suddenly popped up, memory reference erros, couldn't save things to files because did not have administrative rights, and gosh, can't remember what all.

Then, hubby had an odd screen come up. A pop-up type of box that said that computer may be at risk of a malware, I think he said it was. It said something about running a microsoft scan but he didn't do anything with it because we have Webroot program installed and he was leaving that process for me to monitor. He said that it took forever to shut down the browser screen.

At that point, when I came home from work, I noticed the keyboard doing erratic typing thing again. You would type a few words and then suddenly the cursor would just end up back at the beginning of the sentence or a few words behind where you were actually typing and start inserting the new text at random places. If you aren't watching the screen while you type, you don't notice it until you look. Now, hubby does the hunt & peck typing method, me - I just type away - about 70 words a minute and sometimes, I'll be watching the tv ad not looking at either the computer screen or keyboard, so just imagine when you look at the screen and see you're text a really odd mess.

Also, remember - was doing an employment search in our area and would try to enter our zip code... would hit the keys and it would either only take the 1st or maybe up to the 2nd number and then just sit there or not take any of it. This was doing from both the regular and the numeric keypad.

I ran Webroot and it quarantined an item - security_clean.ex or something similar. I was going to try to research it on the internet but couldn't even maintain a connection long enough to do so and just gave up. I ended up doing the recovery/reinstall again the other nite when the mouse was even behaving erraticly.

So frustrated.

At this point, the only things I have reinstalled were the original stuff that came with the laptop setup. I've done Windows updates and just have security essentials running. Afraid to install anything else.

I'm still getting very slow download times for windows updates... very slow to even bring up a browser page and, of course, I checked Facebook a bit ago and it takes forever to scroll through things. I did open up the solitaire blitz game - which asked to install flash. I did but it does respond very slowly.

So, from here...what do I check? How do I determine what to look for? I am so lost.

I've opened up one of those system log viewer check things (Administrative Events) and it has a total of 197 events listed...criticals, errors and warnings. I know I have gone to this in the past and have never seen this many red points! Kind of scary when you don't know what you are looking at.

I'm afraid to do any of our online banking or bill paying and that sort of private stuff due to the fact that I don't know what is going on.

I shall try to see if I can remember anything else that would help. Also, any good advice on what to check and all would be greatly appreciated. I just want this laptop to last until I am lucky enough to get a new full-time job and can get a new computer - which at best estimate is going to be about 3 months or so down the road, if all goes well.

Thank you so much to anyone who is willing to lend some help.

 

[Trouble]

First I would recommend performing an off line scan. Go here What is Windows Defender Offline?
Grab the correct version for your system architecture (32 or 64 bit). The program will help you build a bootable CD from which you can boot your computer and perform a "FULL" system scan independent of your Operating System.
Follow that up with this Malwarebytes : Malwarebytes Anti-Malware removes malware including viruses, spyware, worms and trojans, plus it protects your computer
Download, install and update it and then run a full system scan with that. I would also recommend purchasing the PRO version lifetime license, as it's cheap insurance.
Sounds like you have a bug, BUT..... you mentioned something about "memory errors" so follow up the above with a defrag and then from an administrative command prompt type
chkdsk C: /R
hit enter
type Y
when prompted about performing upon next boot.
Then reboot your system.
Let that finish all five stages and check the event viewer for the results.
Then

Download Memtest86+ from this location here. Burn the ISO to a CD and boot the computer from the CD from a cold boot after leaving it off for an hour or more.
Ideally let it run for at least 7 passes / 6-8 hours. If errors appear before that you can stop that particular test. Any time Memtest86+ reports errors, it can be either bad RAM or a bad Mobo slot. Perform the test RAM sticks individually as well as all possible combinations. When you find a good one then test it in all slots. Post back with the results.
See this Guide to using Memtest 86+

Good luck and keep us posted.
Regards
Randy

 

[terazbox]

I shall work on this over the weekend and let you know what I come up with.
Thanks so much!!!!!