PC Problems

Hey Guys,

I've always gotten better advice here than from our IT guy and the PC forums, so here goes. I have an older (5 or 6 years) HP Compaq PC at work. It originally came with Vista Pro, but last year the hard drive crashed. I had a new, bigger hard drive installed, and upgraded to Windows 7 Pro 64 bit. The last few months it's been acting up, I've been having to reboot several times in the morning to get it to come up sometimes. Last Friday, I booted it as soon as I got here as usual, and it booted fine, except that the icons were missing from my taskbar. So I rebooted. When it came back up, nothing was the same. Background was different, email wasn't set up, all my defaults had changed. Apparently it lost my user profile. ALL of my settings were gone, but my data was still there. I use Thunderbird for personal email, and the program was still there, but everything else was gone. All of my old emails and my login information was gone. I had to set Outlook up like it was my first time. Fortunately, all of the Outlook data is stored on our exchange server, so I didn't lose any of my emails.

Our IT guy tried to recover my user profile from my Acronis backup, but couldn't. I tried to restore the system to the last restore point, which was Tuesday the 2nd, but that didn't work. That puzzled me, since everything was working fine up until Friday morning. Why wouldn't it restore the system back to the way it was? Anyway, I ordered a new PC, but it won't be here until the 15th (hopefully). It's taking longer, because I ordered it with Windows 7.

Until then, I've been trying to redo everything, but I've noticed a couple of weird problems. One, it doesn't remember my last folder settings now. In other words, when I used to open an existing folder (directory), and if I changed the view (say from list to large icons), it would remember that setting. Now, every time I open a folder it defaults to details view no matter what I do. It happens whether I open the folder from Windows Explorer, or from within a program (such as Photoshop).

Two, and this is incredibly annoying, Outlook won't display any images in emails, no matter who they're from. I've set it to download everything (see attached image), but it still won't. All images in emails now show up as a box with an "X" in it. But images do show up in Thunderbird, although I'm sure it's unrelated.

Any advice, thoughts, opinions, or similar experiences?

Curious, what processor does it have? If you don't know off of the top of your head you can click on Start right click on Computer and select properties. Should be listed under the System heading.

Its very suspicious how the user profile got deleted yet the rest of the computer functionality is OK.
To me this suggests there's probably not a hardware fault although as an outside chance hard drive corruption is always possible.
Most likely in my opinion some software got corrupted and mashed up your user profile. Stuff like this happens frequently on corporate systems that are in my opinion over protected from viruses and malware.
If it happened on a home computer I would say that it is probably caused by some sort of malware or similar software issue.

It's shocking that your IT guy couldn't restore the user profile from the Acronis Backup. There are several types of Acronis backups... the one that I use makes an image backup so it would have been possible to flash the entire hard drive back to the exact state it was rather than do the file by file backups which have less likelihood of success in situations like this.

While it's not uncommon for a user profile to get messed up, not being able to find all of the files that were part of your profile is very strange. My wife had a not too different situation go on once on her PC. We couldn't access her profile as in logging on to it. But I was able to eventually go in and extract out her files and set up a new profile for her.

I hope it works out! Good luck!

Marc

At work my boss somehow "breaks" his Outlook every few months or so. Something in his Windows is corrupted and i have to run a patch from Microsoft to fix the images. A restore point doesn't do it. Do a "Google" search for "Outlook not displaying images" and you will find the patch file. I really want to do a fresh windows install on his system.

Jerome

Oh yeah: outlook issue with the red boxes. Can be caused by overfull cache folder for outlook. I have to empty mine every couple months or I get the red boxes. Google how to clear it for your version of Outlook. Or might represent a cache mapping problem since your profile was hosed.

Outlook is pretty notorious for corrupting its data file; the problem is almost certainly program-level, not hardware- or OS-level. Email brokneness is probably the biggest single part of my day job.

I'd seriously recommend migrating to Thunderbird. It's totally free and loads more robust.

How large is your data file?

Try scanning for Maleware and rootkits.
How much RAM is in the computer?
It is recommended to have at least 4 gb or RAM for Win 7


JD

Do a complete reinstall of the operating system. It's what I do whenever glitches happen that I can't figure out. Besides, adding and deleting programs tends to cause registry clutter and slows down your computer . . . a reinstall cleans up a lot of problems.

hball55 said:

Do a complete reinstall of the operating system. It's what I do whenever glitches happen that I can't figure out. Besides, adding and deleting programs tends to cause registry clutter and slows down your computer . . . a reinstall cleans up a lot of problems.

Click to expand...

Constantly re-OSing is generally a bit drastic. Of course, that depends on how badly maintained the computer is... but any time windows is inexplicable, I say you're doing things the hard way.

I hate to say this, but I think you've got a bad hard drive. Something very similar happened to me (XP machine). The OS can fix or ignore small problems/errors, but every once in a while, important stuff gets written onto a bad spot in the drive and something significant fails.

If this is your work PC, have your IT guy look into SpinRite from GRC.com. It can recover almost any drive on it's way out. If used as a maintenance tool, you may never experience a physical drive failure.

I have had many successes with it.

Scan the drive for bad sectors. Sometimes windows can recover if it knows there is a problem

former pc tech.. I agree with the "bad hard drive" comments above. Usually you can kind of nurse these things and have them limp along for a few more months, but it's days are numbered one way or another. Make sure you have current backups because the day it fully dies you can't plan for!

Also, I'm not a backup specialist, but backing up a computer system is only as good as your ability to restore it. Backups should be checked fairly regularly to make sure you can actually retrieve your data from them!

qquake2k said:

This computer eats hard drives. It's on its third. The current one is a Western Digital Black, which I was told is one of the best.

Click to expand...

Sounds like a controller on the mobo is causing corruption... the drives themselves might be physically good if reformatted and stuck in another machine.

I would drop down to command prompt and do the following 2 commands as an Admin

chkdsk /R /F C:

sfc /scannow

then after that close out of command prompt.
Find the application ComboFix from bleeping computer (Google Combofix bleeping computer) and ONLY download from bleeping computer's website.
Run the application and follow all the steps with your antivirus turned OFF!

Restart the PC with antivirus turned on.
I would run a repair on Office to scan it for errors. It might require a restart.

If you need more help after this PM me.... im terrible looking back at threads.

Okay, I've got the new PC and have been loading the software on it. It's time to transfer the data. But when I try to open Windows Easy Transfer on my old PC, I get the attached error. I Googled it, and the solution seems scary to me, as it involves the registry. Does anyone know of a simpler way around it?

https://www.thewindowsclub.com/wind...currently-logged-on-using-a-temporary-profile

The post that resurrected this thread smelled spammy but I can't really prove it so I'm deleting everything new and letting it drift back into the mists from whence it came...