Laptop Probs

Basil_Fawlty

Hi

I've got a Dell Inspiron 6000, nearly 12 months old now, but I was typing an email earlier when the screen suddenly went a pink/red colour, all over the screen

Anyone know why this is? It isn't the first time this has happened - probably occured around 4 times now in the last 12 months but it's still annoying especially when work hasn't been saved. Luckily I pressed CTRL + S but if more than one window had been open I may not have been so lucky.

Also its startup time is around 5 mins, which is strange for a Pentium M 1.6 with 512RAM isn't it? I don't have excessive software installed to run, just antispyware, firewall, antivirus. And messenger and the other usual tray icons like wireless, sound, touchpad. But I don't see why it's suddenly so slow at startup.

Any ideas??

Cheers :beer: appreciate any help with this!

Basil_Fawlty

Anyone? I'm pondering a full system restore at the moment so if I can prevent this I'll be a happy chappy I've run the Windows Live Safety scanner which did a registry scan and removed some dead entries. Apart from that I'm spyware and virus clean so not sure about the cause

albertross_2

you can use autoruns or hijackthis or msconfig to see what extra crud has been added to your PC at startup:

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Autoruns.html

Also, you could try https://www.ccleaner.com for a quick cleanup.

If you search the chat forum for greatis, you will find some other similar threads, e.g.:

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=251622&highlight=greatis

Have you enabled automatic updates in control panel, security center?

The pink/red effect may be a loose screen connector, try pressing firmly all over the keyboard, and the edge of the screen when it happens again.

Basil_Fawlty

Thanks for that - I ran the autoruns program and there were many progs but I'm not sure which to disable if any.

Also the issue with the screen blanking out - it seems to do this in random colours. Just now it went black, yesterday it went pink, a week ago it went blue. It's like I'm running dead pixel buddy or something but I can't get rid of it unless I standby then wake up again. Can anyone help with what this could possibly be? I'm going to be in my third year and really don't want my laptop doing this if I'm in the midst of my dissertation writeup :eek: :rotfl:

If there's a key combination I could try please let me know because atm I keep losing my work if not saved regularly :doh: