I think it's a Dell conspiracy....

[OneGrassRoot]

I got the blue screen of death the other day, spent hours and hours online with tech support running every possible diagnostic. The hard drive didn't seem to have any problems so it was chalked up to an error with the OS.

I miraculously found a friend of a friend who does data recovery and he was able to save most of what I needed. The next step was to swipe the system clean and reload everything.

Well, I was on the phone nearly all day with India doing just that and at the end of the day, things seemed to be fairly normal, back to the starting point of when I got it.

The tech rep said, "Now, I see you don't have antivirus protection." I said, "Well, of course not. There's nothing on here right now. I need to reload everything, but that's the first thing I'll do."

He said, "Okay, insert the disk." I told him I download it. He asked from who, and I mentioned that I've tried several but like Avast and AVG. He nearly yelled, "Oh no, Ma'am!!! You can't do that. They are not recommended."

We went round and round and I told him I'm not paying for a service that I'm not happy with (Norton, Panda, etc.). In fact, I didn't say it, but I don't intend to pay for anything. I've been using Avast and AVG's free programs and they've seemed to work fine.

So, that's the first thing I did. I went to Avast, then AVG, then tried to do Lavasoft's free Ad-Aware program.

Every time I tried to download one of these programs, it would stall and an error would come up saying something to the effect: blahfilenameblah is not a valid win 32 application.

Isn't win32 a really bad thing? (Yes, I'm an idiot about these things)

I never could download any of those free programs.

I clicked on the Security Center to see who THEY recommended, and of course it was the normal Norton, Panda, etc. They also had McAfee, and I went ahead and downloaded the 90-day trial just to see if I could, given my experience with the other sites, and sure enough, not a problem.

These people were working on getting my system back up yesterday by remote access, so they were in there. They needed to install advanced drivers beyond the disk I had.

Do you think there is something on there now which prevented my ability to download one of these free programs successfully?

Too weird......

[trotsky]

1. The "not a valid win32 application" message can be nothing, or it can be serious.

What OS did you reinstall with? XP?

[OneGrassRoot]

2. Yes, XP.....but there was one development that may have influenced this....

When I turned the laptop on this morning, there was a message that it had a ton of updates which needed installed (should have expected that but didn't think of it). Upon installing those, I was able to download Lavasoft's free Ad-Aware, for example.

Perhaps the lack of one of these updates resulted in the message I kept receiving last night when trying to download these programs?

[trotsky]

3. Could very well be that an out-of-date XP system file was causing problems.

Or it could have been corrupt, and applying updates got you the latest (uncorrupt) version.

Dell of course is full of crap, and you can run those free anti-virus / anti-spyware apps just fine. I recommend them for most home PC users I help.

[OneGrassRoot]

4. Thanks for the confirmation and feedback...

It's always much appreciated!

(In all honesty, I can't tell you all here at DU, especially at this forum, how much I value your help. It means the world. I'm not a techie, I work from home and rely on my computer wholly, and you guys have led me through the darkness more than once. Many thanks.)

[trotsky]

5. You are very welcome.

I just feel bad for the average home user - the "official" support options, like Dell or heaven forbid Geek Squad, are so inadequate or so ridiculously overpriced, I do a lot of work for my friends & family for beer and post here if I can help.

[amerikat]

6. If you get the blue screen again.....try this on the dell

Just yesterday a friend brought me his Dell laptop(he had no system disk). It booted to the blue screen something about MMpool corrupted. Tried everything at the dell website to no avail. I finally convinced him to order a system disk from dell. He phoned to get the disk but the service rep told us this trick.


turn the computer on while holding the ctrl key and keep hitting the F-11 key. It forces the machine to boot from a separate partition on the hard drive.

It worked and reloaded the operating system, we then updated windows(83 files). He's back on track now.

[Gore1FL]

7. I create images for a living.

Load windows.

Go to windows update, choose custom, and select everytihng available (but hardware updates for video cards)

Repeat until there are no more updates.

Check your manufacture site for the lastest drivers (Dell has a sticker on your PC so you can find specifically what you need)

Load office.

Go to windows update and then choose the microsoft update,

Update, reboot, and go back again until it updates no more.

defrag

I strongly recommend loading (in this order) 7-zip (it's a free Winzip), Firefox, Adobe Flash, Shockwave, (and Reader as long as you are there)

Reboot,

defrag

Load your other software, saving ad-aware and AVG for last. (Anti-virus makes the rest of this slow)

Run update checks and scans for both of these

defrag

***
If you invest in something like Symmantec Ghost, you won't need to defrag. You can ghost your full image as it is to DVDs and then reload the same image back to your PC completely defragged. That might be a little pricey, but if you ever need to reload again, you'll need to do is update the O/S and software which makes the installation much faster should you ever need to do it in the future.
***

There are some neat tools at sysinternals you can browse through as well. (it is a microsoft site, just google sysinternals) and browse.

[DainBramaged]

8. Amateurs need not apply when using the sysinternals site

Acronis makes great imaging software. Paragon is good too.

[Gore1FL]

9. You are right about sysinternals

I was thinking along the lines of pagedefrag. But yeah... even that is like replacing automobile brakes with no experience.

[DainBramaged]

10. Or changing pistons

CLAnk, bANG, BOOM


Go here

http://ubcd.sourceforge.net/