e1405 Problem/s

I was listening to music earlier and had the following windows open. Limewire, Mozilla Firefox, and Winamp. While listening I wasn't at the time downloading anything then while browsing the music started to skip (mp3's on HDD) and everything started to crawl. The laptop would not respond very well.. so I decided to reboot.. well it shuts down and starts up but takes around 5-6 minutes to get past the Windows XP screen with the little bar on black background.

When it finally gets to the Windows screen with blue background the opening theme sound is garbled. I reinstalled directX 9.0c, directx sound, winamp, limewire, and firefox. At the moment i'm running a virusscan which has yet to pick up anything significant. After that scan I will run Adaware and see if I got some spyware or whatnot from www.winamp.com.

Also this laptop runs to many processes when you do ctrl-alt-delete. At one time I had as much as 76 processes!!! I disabled a lot of the startup programs thru run/msconfig but its till ends up with atleast 60+.

If anyone has any suggestions i'd appreciate your help. If all else fails.. I haven't had the laptop for too long so there isn't anything on it worthwhile.. i'll just format it and be done.

I also added a 512 stick of ram but, its still seated properly and running properly.

Thanks

 

i'd say that's your answer right there. sounds like you know what you're doing, i would just knock it out and have a fresh system.

 

Seconded. Sounds liek you already knew it needed to be done.

 

You need to format it. When l first got my E1405 there were also over 70 processes running. But after reformat when browsing the web l have about 40 running. I would cut it down even more but there are a few processes that l don't recognize so l will leave them alone.

 

Sorry, not trying to thread hijack, but I didnt recieve MCE reinstallation disks with my e1405, How do I go about reformatting without those disks?

 

Go on dells support chat and tell them you forgot to order them or something and they should overnight ship them to you for free.

 

I didn't reformat, I just installed everything I didn't need, including the proWireless software fromn Intel, etc. Then I cleaned the registry.

With McAffee still running and opening one browser window I am down to exactly 40. And I think MCaffee is like 6 of those that are left.

 

I just did a System Restore instead of formatting and everything seems to be running good right now. I think the culprit is LimeWire so I probably won't be using it anymore.

 

I agree that is always the best thing to do. That way you avoid further headaches and problems