Irritating problem

I've had my 5793 now for a little over a month and it's worked good from what I can tell (since it's primarily my wife's computer since I use this one), but as of this week, I've been having some issues with it. It started bluescreening as I was booting into windows vista ultimate and wouldn't boot up properly. Finally it was working normally again, but now, vista has shut off its firewall and won't let me turn it back on and it's only giving me a limited connection to the network, denying me internet access even when plugged in via cable.

I've been trying to figure out for hours what is going on but I'm a bit clueless. :\

 

Run a virus scan.

 

Did, nothing came up unusual.

 

Do a system restore to a previous better working state.

 

I looked for a restore point, there were none.

 

Any important data on the hdd? if not, full system reinstall, looks like either your vista is corrupted or something.
You might want to check the RAM sticks individually for a day or so, BSOD are usually instabilities from bad RAM sticks.
I don`t think you have undervolted , have you? If not, then do the RAM test.

 

do you have the vista dvd it came with? is it a full version or a upgrade? if you have a "upgrade" version disc you can simply re-install vista as a upgrade and this will not hurt any of the exisiting data on your pc.. then simply boot to the new vista and delete the windows.old directory... now you have a "fresh install" without loosing anything or you can try to restore the bcd of vista by doing this:

Boot with Vista DVD and go to Repair Option
Click on Command Prompt and type the command

bootrec.exe /fixmbr
x:\boot\bootsect.exe /nt60 all /force (replace x with your dvd drive) (

then type:

del C:\boot\bcd
bootrec.exe /rebuildbcd (this will "ask" vista to rebuild the bcd from scratch)

then type:

shutdown -r -t 0 (this will reboot the system please remove the dvd now)

this is normally for more extreme measures and there is even one step further i can post for you but try this before doing a full re-install.. i have some other ideas as well if this does not work

 

I'll try that in a few, but I think I will end up having to do a complete format, which sucks, but there wasn't much on it to begin with. I was just hoping to avoid all this mess when I bought this.

I also did a ram test, nothing came up as a problem. I'm thinking some files just got corrupted somehow.

 

i merged my two posts see above now i updated my post

 

Yah, I have the Vista DVD, so I'll give that a shot.

 

I will recommend to do the following:
- HDD error check: go to Command Prompt (RUN > CMD), type CHKDSK C: /F, then yes and restart to check disk
- MemTest86+ (burn the ISO and let it autoboot to scan for errors)

 

It ended up being a corrupt file... more than one. I had to do a complete format and install. Meh, hopefully that won't happen again.

 

Hopefully that's all it was; however, just to be on the safe side, you should get a good hdd diagnostic utility and have it check the hdd from stem to stern, and look under all of the sectors. The last hdd I had on my vaio - a Western Digital - started developing a lot of bad sectors quickly, and the first symptoms I had of that was the inability to boot due to a corrupted system file, which, as it turned out, happened to be right in the middle of a big batch of bad sectors.

So, unless you know more or less how that file got corrupted, I wouldn't take chances and just let it be - better to be safe (and a little unhappy) than sorry (and a lot unhappy).

 

imo get your self a good backup program like paragon or acronis... i use them all the time