my Aspire 3680 switched to XP!

I have had so many problems with this computer it is unreal.

I don't know what is wrong with it. I tried doing a system restore from safe mode and it got stuck I turned it off and tried ALT+F10 and XP started up!

Well....I say it started up. It has been on the WindowsXP start up page with the blue bar on the bottom moving for about 45 minutes.

Please tell me there is something I can do!

I can't buy another computerright now nor do I have money to fix it.

I had to borrow the computer I'm writing this on just to make this post.

Please HELP!!!!!

 

Tell us the detailed history of your problems and maybe someone can help here to find out where things started going wrong with your lappie.

 

I'm not sure what happened.

It was just going very slowly. It has been for some time.

It then started taking forever for it to start up.

Then it started bogging down easily and freezing up.

Upon starting up last week it started going to the startup repair choices that you would have if you pressed F8 at startup.

Start up repair would work sometimes, other times it wouldn't. Sometimes I would try system restore and it would work, but not always.

Sometimes it would startup but it couldn't connect with windows.

Yesterday I tried starting in safe mode but I couldn't figure out what to do with it from there so i tried doing another system restore from the safe mode and it froze up. I held down the power button to get it to turn off. I saw about starting up Acers with the Alt+F10 pressed but it went straight to trying to load XP. It never loaded it. In fact I tried it all night. I went to bed hoping that it would eventually startup but it didn't. I turned it off this morning, waited a bit, and then tried it again but it did the same thing.

 

OK. I am going to try and help here...so don't bash me

First of all, do you have any AV installed? If so, what are you using?

 

no bashing.

I would probably have to know something before I did.

dumb question (that i am asking)....what is AV?

 

oh....audio visual?

I don't have anything plugged up. the only thing I ever have plugged up is a pair of headphones/microphone. I haven't done that very often.

 

AV usually mean AntiVirus software.

 

sorry.

i have AVG

 

does that help give any ideas?

 

OK. Are you the only person that uses the comp? (I am trying to see if maybe somebody else downloaded stuff that could harm it).

Process of elimination. And AVG is not nearly as capable as Avast or Avira free versions

We need to find out why it started to slow down over a period of time.

I have a gut feeling you have a nasty old virus somewhere in your system.

I leave it up to ATG to help further here

Cheers,
Theo

 

only me using it.

I stripped it down last week to just a couple programs but still it messed up.

 

Several months ago my one year old daughter fell on it causing the lid to close hard. I think something may have happened to the hard drive when that happened because it wouldn't load windows back up. I did the ALT+F10 at that point after I had used ubuntu to go in and get a few files I needed that I hadn't put on my removable hard drive.

I know that one thing that may have caused it to slow was I mistakenly made it look for a network cable before going to the hard drive but I corrected that.

 

Calling ATG

Our very own Uber Mod on the Acer forum

Help here please

Cheers,
Theo

 

Sorry, but I'm not 24/7 on NBR.



To the OP:

I think you might have bad hard disk. This could be checked with some free utilities CDs like Ultimate BootCD. Get the ISO, burn it to a CD then startup your laptop FROM the CD. (Do you know how to do that?). On the CD there are various hard disk diagnostic programs, choose one and test your hard disk.

You said that when you press Alt+F10 your laptop went straight to Windows right? This means you either don't have the recovery partition(or the original ACER MBR) OR you press Alt+F10 too soon/late. When you press the power button to start your laptop, start hitting Alt+10 like crazy, if you still have the recovery partition you'll eventually start the recovery process. By the way before you do that, enter in the BIOS(hitting F2 on boot) and make sure "D2D Recovery" is Enabled.

Try all these then please report back.

 

Thanks ATG for helping here.

Cheers,
Theo

 

Thanks.

I am downloading UBCD right now but I tried hitting altf10 like a madman and still couldn't get it to stop trying to load XP. I don't even know how it made the switch to that.

D2D is enabled.

 

Thanks for what you have done, btw.

 

Then, as I said, you don't have the recovery partition anymore or you have the original MBR(master boot record) overwritten and therefore Alt+F10 do nothing. Did you install XP from a disk? Ever used the recovery partition? Do you have recovery CDs?

Edit: By the way is your laptop really old? I read somewhere that in the old days Acer used Alt+ F11 combo instead! Try that too..

 

year and a half old.

tried the altf11 and it did the same thing.

i didn't do anything with XP on it expect wish that I had it instead of vista from time to time. i did read that acer and some other companies had XP on their machines as well.

I never installed it, though.

 

i have to go out for a few hours to run some errands. I will try the UBCD when i get back.

thanks for the help.

i will be back in here later.

 

I guess I don't know how to do that. I tried. I burned it to CD and put it in the cd drive and tried starting it with the cd but it wouldn't work.

 

still no luck.

 

You need to set your CD-ROM as first choice in the Boot section in your BIOS

OR

You need to enable the F12 menu(main page of the BIOS) then restart, hit F12 and choose to boot from the CD.