Help! Dell laptop gone weird.

slowlyfading

This morning I checked my emails on my laptop and everything was fine, though something popped up to say that Windows Host had stopped working. But that was it. I get home after work, and my laptop is SO slow to start, taking ages to load, and continuingly crashing. Does anyone know what could be happening?
I bought it in April off the dell website, and its Windows Vista.

mkbswimstar

Haven't a clue however I bought mine in Jan and somehow the hardrive went and they wanted to send me the part in the post but as im no techie and came across as thick and demanding they sent a really lovely chap to me the next day and fixed it all for free.
I did have trouble talking to cust services and getting it logged as it was a premium rate line and using my mobile and they all appear to be from Inida. I just started to shout and lose it a bit at them and they became very obliging when I threatened to tell eveyone they are useless.
Hope u don't have these troubles and u sort it yourself but if not don't take any rubbish from them.

Buzzbox

Do you have an anti-virus program installed like Norton or Avast? I would definately recommend you download a program called Ad-Aware (Free) and do a scan. It be will painful at first but I suspect that you might have picked up something through your emails... sounds like a Trojan to me but I can't be a 100% sure without looking at it.

vyseyboy

It could be a plethora of things. If you have an older version of Nero installed, it can cause this problem, and the fix is to update to a newer version.

But the extreme slowness to me suggests some virus or malware problem.

I'd suggest going through this thread to rule it out. Although it's largely geared at Win XP, so ignore those parts.

There's no harm in trying out superantispyware / spybot S & D anyway, they are generally good and finding and cleaning up nasties.

Browntoa

go back to yesterday using system restore, no data gets lost

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial143.html

takes 3 mins and eliminates some sort of data corruption

slowlyfading

thanks for the replies. I can't scan it though, as it just crashes every time, and i can't seem to do much else. Think I'll have to take it in

vyseyboy

Can you start in safe mode without crashes?

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/chsafe.htm#03

slowlyfading

^^ thanks, I can do that. I'm going to take it to a computer shop this afternoon i think.

espresso

slowlyfading wrote: »

^^ thanks, I can do that. I'm going to take it to a computer shop this afternoon i think.

Be prepared to spend ££££'s then!

slowlyfading

not much else i can do....

espresso

slowlyfading wrote: »

not much else i can do....

So exactly what have you done?