My Mother's Computer

My mom is a retiree and spend fair amount of time on her computer. She has been complaining recently how slow it has gotten. I did the usual stuff (e.g., spyware, anti-virus, disk clean, defrag). It didn't really help so I decided to reformat the hard drive and reinstall the operating system.

Her computer configurations are

Model: HP Pavillion 522C with 1.76GHz AMD Athlon XP, 256MB DDR SDRAM, CD RW, DVD ROM, 60GB Ultra DMA Harddrive, 32MB NVIDI nForce DSRAM. It came with windows XP home edition and the MS office suite.

My goal was to get it to the factory state when she first bought the machine. So I ran the HP tool for system recovery/restore (I forget the exact name here) but it wasn't the recovery tool for getting your computer to a previous saved state.

I followed the directions and when it was all said and done, the computer rebootted and the windows icon came up and said "waiting" and I could hear the hard drive going. This went on for two days... windows icon and the words "waiting" below it.

My mother shut the system down by unplugging it, after about 48 hours. When I now try to restart the system, I first see the windows icon. It then gets to a window that is entitled "ISASS.exe-system error". In the window, it says "when tring to update password return value does not match".

Any idea what is going on? I cannot even boot from a disk as when this computer was bought all the system stuff was stored on the computer (it came that way). So when I was reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling the operating system, it read the "origional stuff" from a file on the hard drive.

Any help would be appreciated. This computer is a major outlet for her as far as entertainment and communication to the outside and I'd like to get it back in order since I do feel very responsible for its break.

Setter

 

BTW, I called HP and have been on their support website. They were no help but will sell me a recovery kit for $22.13. Any of you think this would solve this problem?

Setter

 

Ordering the Recovery Kit from HP will restore the computer to the state it was when first purchased.