Windows help.

Let me first say hi and introduce myself. I have a problem with a friends computer that I'm wondering if you guys can help with. Please bare with me, however I am trying to give as much info as possible for a hopeful resolution.

When she first gave me her laptop, a sony vaio, 1.66 GHz, with a gig of ram, her problem was that upon loading her computer windows would get as far as the loading screen then she'd get the blue screen of death then restarting over and over and over.

I then ran the windows disk and did the chkdsk /r, and it reset and I actually got into her computer via safe mode. Unfortunately I did not know what I was looking for to correct the problem, so while in safe mode I figured doing a disk defragment would fix it, I dunno...

When I reset her computer, I ran into a problem, right before the login screen it said there was a problem with lsass.exe. Now I understand there is a viscious virus that disguises and hides and poses as such. So I then re-ran windows and chkdsk's and this and that. Nothing.

So I re-installed windows but I didnt format her drive, and windows did not create another copy of windows, when the computer loads it loads up like a good normal computer.

I used getbackdata to get her pictures and music and such....

HERE IS MY QUESTION:

After the re-install and such, it seems like its running bits of the old windows and the newly installed windows.... for example...

C:/program files still has ALL of the program(s) files still listed/loaded, however none of them work, and I need them to work. Is there anyway to get these to work without re-installing them, because we have none of the disks to do so. I also need to get her sound card, wireless card, etc etc working...

I'm feeling overwhelmed here, can anybody help me out?

Thanks
Matt

 

Hmm, no-one has answered yet... I'd be interested to know what other people think of this one.

I can tell you a couple of things though; lsass.exe is a legitimate Windows file but is also the name used for a trojan/downloader. It depends where it is.

Defragging only tidies up the files on the computer. It's kind of like Mum coming into your room and saying, "You've got a chest of drawers - put all those clothes in it and make some floor space around here!" Exactly the same cubic size in your room but when things are tidy, there's more usable space available.

Have a look on the hard disk and see if you can find any folders called drivers or sony directly under C:\ and if you can, try pointing to that when you try to upgrade the drivers. Although it isn't hard and fast, laptops often seem to have the drivers sitting in a folder on the hard disk.

 

Do me a favor. Go to control panel, add/remove programs. Are her programs actually listed?

 

Chances are when you re-installed Windows, it lost the files associations, shortcuts, dedicated .dll's for the programs, and so forth. As far as I know, the only way to actually get those programs to work is to re-install them. If they're all listed in Program Files, but there's no shortcuts on the desktop, and none are listed in Start > All Programs, then you'll have to reload the programs

hopperdave2000