I have a Gateway desktop I bought refurbished from the manufacturer early last year. I'm running Vista. My defrag's have been running every day, and I've done thorough checks with AVG and other security scans for spyware, adware, viruses, etc. Nothing bigger than a few tracking cookies have shown up.

Here are the problems that have popped up in the last week, in no particular order. Forgive me if this is not pithy:

1) There a few programs I cannot run at all. These include (and for now appear to be limited to) Rosetta Stone and iTunes. These cannot be run through the start menu, or the desktop, or any other way of accessing the programs. Most weird - when I right click on the desktop icons, I get no dropdown list of things I can do. With every other icon, I get the traditional "Open, Run as, Scan using..." list. With these, a little grey box pops up upon the right click, but it is empty and has no words or anything to click. These were both working perfectly last week.

2) My browsers (IE and Mozilla) both are functioning, but regularly pause or crap out for 10-30 seconds while processing. This occurs whether the workload in the browser is small or large, with multiple videos open or simply one tab with a plain text site. Very occasionally it will stop responding altogether. Most of the time I just have to wait < 1 minute and I'm back in business.

3) Restarts are painfully slow. I get to the windows logon screen just fine - no speed problems. But once it goes to my desktop screen, it will be 10-40 minutes before I can open a program.

4) Fearing a hard-drive problem, I wanted to run Disk-Check...and this is where it got more weird. When I open "Computer" from the desktop, I of course get that window where all my drives are shown. But there is no text within the window at all. None of the little icons have labels on them. When I roll the mouse over what I know is the C: Drive, it does tell me "Space free: 280GB, Total Space: 382GB."

I should be able to right-click on the C Drive and tell it to run the Disk-Check...right? Well, there is no such option. I get, with a right-click, "Open, Explore, Scan with AVG, Share, Spare Backup."

This is the case no matter how I get to the C Drive, whether through My Documents or all other methods I try to get the C icon up. None of them will let me run disk check.

What's wrong and what can I do?

8/20/2009 8:16:51 PM

http://www.windows-help-central.com/windows-vista-chkdsk.html

8/20/2009 8:58:06 PM

Thank you for not reading my post at all. Others who did the same had the courtesy not to post.

That site tells you how to perform a disk check. I already know how to perform a disk check.

I specifically stated that when I right-click on my C drive, exactly as that site (and every other) instructs, I do not get a "properties" option. Therefore, that site is no help at all.

The question is this: How can I run a disk check, or figure out what the problem is, without being able to access Disk-Check by right-clicking on the C drive?

8/20/2009 11:04:25 PM

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315265

8/20/2009 11:10:49 PM

sweet, thanks.

Never done that before, but had heard it was possible to do it through command lines.

Let's see how this goes....

8/20/2009 11:13:31 PM

Ok, now I am seriously about to break something.

"Run" on the start menu doesn't work. I clicked it, and it doesn't even try to do anything with it. I restarted, tried again, and still get nothing.

8/20/2009 11:36:15 PM

when I'm at the point that I'm about to break something, that's usually when I start to consider wiping the drive and starting fresh.

8/21/2009 12:44:53 AM

You were such an asshole in your reply, I don't think I want to fucking help you. Why don't you shove a dildo up your ass, or maybe try Windows+R to open a run prompt. If that doesn't work, you could possibly find some big manlover who is into fisting or if it's even in Vista, right click My Computer and goto the Manage option. If you can open the management console, there should be a storage section to the tree. Should this not work, you can try sexually assaulting a child so you can spend 20 years in pound-me-in-the-ass federal prison or open the Control Panel go to Administrative tools, and find Computer management. This assumes Vista is anything like XP.

Quote :

"The question is this: How can I run a disk check, or figure out what the problem is, without being able to access Disk-Check by right-clicking on the C drive?"

When you first said that, I thought you meant there to be an explicit "Check this disk" option in the context menu. Next time you're going to be an ass about it, I'm never helping you again.

8/21/2009 1:05:57 AM

Windows+R is no good. I had also tried Computer -> Manage-> Storage is also no good. It comes up just fine, but no ability to do anything with it. Same thing with going through the Control Panel and Admin Tools.

Quote :

"When you first said that, I thought you meant there to be an explicit "Check this disk" option in the context menu. Next time you're going to be an ass about it, I'm never helping you again."

I can see how it could be read that way. And I thought about that after making my obligatory be-an-ass-to-the-first-unhelpful-post post. But I did put in quotes the entire dropdown list of options upon right clicking, which did not include Properties. It's a wash on that, but I was wrong to be on such a short fuse.

The Rosetta Stone aspect is what has me pissed. I spent a lot of $ on that, and sure, I can wipe the drive and start fresh as a last resort. But doing so would involve a terribly long and messy process to get RS back running. To re-install it would require going through their customer service and a bunch of other hoops. They protect their shit like crazy.

[Edited on August 21, 2009 at 3:49 AM. Reason : df]

8/21/2009 3:49:08 AM

Have you tried Safe Mode at all?

8/21/2009 6:26:25 AM

format
reinstall
..
profit

also might replace the hd if it still gives problems

8/21/2009 7:07:05 AM

I'd probably d/l and run memtest. Vista started screwing up on me in a similar fashion a few days before I started getting BSODs. I thought for sure it was the hdd (slow restarts, sluggish when running, acting really wonky) but in the end it was a stick of RAM that went bad.

Worst case scenario, you run memtest before doing anything else, find out it's fine, and mark memory of the possibilities list before going through all the trouble of format/reinstall.

[Edited on August 21, 2009 at 9:45 AM. Reason : ]

8/21/2009 9:43:53 AM

^Yeah that was a random one, glad you got it taken care of though.

Quote :

"My defrag's have been running every day"

Why are you running defrag every day? Completely unnecessary wear on the drive... granted if it's already been done, the subsequent times are much faster.

8/21/2009 1:16:10 PM

I actually just discovered that they had been running every day. I didn't set it up that way. The only thing I could figure is that it was an automatic setting in Vista.

I discovered it when I was first trying to address the problems with the easy stuff - virus/spyware scans, disk cleanup, etc. When I went to defrag, I saw that an automatic setting to do this every morning at 3 a.m. was enabled. I turned it off, because there's just no reason for it.

I've downloaded and will be running memtest soon. Thanks for the help, all.

8/21/2009 1:23:28 PM

Copy Files
Wipe it
Reinstall

I sent you my phone number. I can help you for a fee. I also have a brand new hard drive sitting here if you need it.

8/21/2009 1:26:56 PM

Quote :

"Copy Files Wipe it Reinstall"

I'm hoping it doesn't come to this, as there are few things in this world I hate more than that process. But if it does, I'll be able to do it myself. As much as I value not torturing myself with that, and the customer service nightmare that will come with some of the software I have.....I value my money more. Thanks for the offer, but I'm hoping to find something that's both free and doesn't involve the nuclear option.

8/21/2009 1:32:54 PM

Separate post: new symptom discovered. File search from the start menu also doesn't work. It does open, but I can't search for anything

8/21/2009 1:36:15 PM

not really sure why you think it's so bad.. it doesn't take that long. and probably takes less time than you've spent doing this.

a cheap external drive makes it quick to move documents back and forth.

[Edited on August 21, 2009 at 1:39 PM. Reason : and you're getting to the point where you have no other choice and need to get your shit OFF there]

8/21/2009 1:36:37 PM

Quote :

"not really sure why you think it's so bad.. it doesn't take that long. and probably takes less time than you've spent doing this. a cheap external drive makes it quick to move documents back and forth. [Edited on August 21, 2009 at 1:39 PM. Reason : and you're getting to the point where you have no other choice and need to get your shit OFF there]"

Point taken. Looks like it's come to that.

8/21/2009 1:52:56 PM

Quote :

"The only thing I could figure is that it was an automatic setting in Vista."

Didn't know Vista did that, mine was set to every Wednesday at 1am. I figure once every other month is sufficient, if at all necessary, so I changed my settings.

8/21/2009 2:50:52 PM

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

This disc will be able to test your hard drive outside of Vista. Like ScHpEnXeL, I recommend backing up all the important data you have because there are so many odd things going on with your computer. Either your hard drive is damaged or something has attacked your Vista installation and there's no trace of it left.

8/21/2009 2:53:20 PM

Have you tried putting in your Windows recovery cd in order to use the chkdsk utility from the recovery console? When I was unable to use chkdsk from run I popped in my recovery cd and used chkdsk from the recovery console and it fixed my problem. However, it sounds like your problem might require atomic warfare.

[Edited on August 21, 2009 at 3:14 PM. Reason : -]

8/21/2009 3:12:24 PM

^^I'm covered with Carbonite. I just hope that all of a sudden it is not being disrupted as well. It appears to be working normally.

And I've now discovered that downloading files is a problem. The memtest thing did not appear in the location it said it was downloading to....and I already mentioned my search and run functions are not working. Just tried downloading one of those bootdisks, and the same thing happened. It "downloaded" and then disappeared

^That's worth a shot. I knew there were more ways than I had tried. Thanks.

All this, and yet I can surf the web to ask questions about it, and use my VOIP flawlessly to ask a few IT guys I know.

[Edited on August 21, 2009 at 5:54 PM. Reason : a]

8/21/2009 5:52:17 PM

Well, I threw in the towel. I'm up and running on a new, bigger, better hard drive and suffered no real data loss. I guess there are worse things that could have happened.

8/21/2009 11:45:17 PM

taek it to teh genius bar and pay 372 dollars

8/23/2009 8:48:13 PM