big problems with compaq presario c700 running vista home basic

im not totally sure if this is the right location for my question, so feel free to move it if you like...


i have had my laptop ( a compaq presario c700) for about a year, and one day it decided not to start up, i ran start up recovery (?) or something over and over again, with no results, and one day the thing just turned on by itself. after a day of working but running very slowly, i decide to run a virus scan with avg free edition. halfway through the scan, the computer froze so i restarted and scanned again, with another freeze on a different file to the first time. i uninstalled avg and installed my mum's copy of trend micro something or other and the computer froze mid scan, surprise surprise.. i got sick of bothering so i saved a few important files and f-11ed and did a full system recovery to factory programs and settings, then deleted the hp bloatware and games. midway through deleting my laptop freezes AGAIN, and when i try to restart it tol me the same thing as the first time it decided not to bother restarting!

this is now the second full factory restore i've done, and i'm not sure if it will work.

so my questions are these:
1. i'd like to do a clean install, but never received windows vista disks with my laptop (thankyou compaq) and i've read in a few forums that its basically impossible to do this without the disks. i'm wondering if anyone at all has figured a way around this?

2. if i have some kind of virus, would i just be better off buying a new hard drive/laptop?


any help anyone has would be much appreciated!

 

Well, one thing you may want to look into is getting your motherboard replaced. If that laptop has nVidia graphics, then you could be a victim of hardware failure. If your computer is covered under the extended warranty that HP has put out, then they should fix it for free. Also, the reason you didn't receive any restore discs with your computer is because many computer manufacturers don't include them anymore, but give you a restore partition on your hard drive so you can make your own restore discs.

 

Have you scanned the HDD for bad sectors, might be worth running a scan with HDTune.

I've had some HDD issues lately with bad sectors, and my laptop kept freezing, running slowly.

 

Yea...Check ur HDD first ..for that google it..or else u can try any thing u like for the checking of the bad sector.Its seems that u r HDD gone bad.

Try to scan ur hard disk using another machine if u uable to do that then check for the bad sectors i ur HDD.

Best of Luck.
Let us know what happened.
Thank you.

 

That's almost assuredly a failing hard drive. If you can get it up and running again, check the event logs to see if anything related to the drive failing got logged in.

 

See if it's still under warranty.