Tag Archives: repair

Replace Laptop Screen

Computer Problems, ,

A few days ago something fell on my laptop. When I turned it on there were some lines in it, I could see most of it but some areas I couldn’t make out. I could still use it but certain things I had to guess at. Now I don’t like doing repairs on laptops because everything is small so I was just going to buy a new one. I usually look on Amazon so I went there from my sons store at OverHome Marketplace , the cost is the same so I figured I’d let someone get a commission for it. A low end Laptop was about $350.00 and it was a smaller screen than mine so I did a search for a replacement screen for mine and it was only $69.87 so I took a chance and ordered it.

I figured I should read up on it or watch a video or something and found a site that gave pretty good directions on it at insidemylaptop.com . Took me maybe an hour, the main problems I had were plugging the cables back in because I had trouble seeing them (they are small and the pins are even smaller). I did manage it and tested everything out and the camera and microphone works, display looks better than it did when the machine was new.

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Zango Spyware

Virus Spyware, , , ,

Windows XP

 

Over the weekend Sept. 8 2008 while working on a machine I ran spybot. It found some adware called Zango. Spybot said it had to reboot to remove some of it and that is where the problem starts. When it reboots you will see
“c:\windows\system32\command.com

The parameter is incorrect.” Clicking it keeps reporting error message over and over. The system never really goes beyond that point.

Took a little research but here is how I corrected it

Log on to the system in safe mode. Start regedit. Navigate to the following registry key and see if there is an entry with “c:\windows\system32\command.com …” in the data portion of the entry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce
It had several entries to run Spybot and remove things so I deleted those entries and restarted the machine. Ran Spybot again and undid the changes to that section and it seemed to work fine.

I didn’t do it because it wasn’t my machine but they say you can remove it instructions here.

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Laptop Hard Drive not working

Computer Problems, , , , , ,

Just recently a friend brought a laptop to me because it wouldn’t boot up. When I tried it the machine said there was no hard drive in it.

I was going to pull the hard drive and try it as and external drive on my machine to see it it could be salvaged as they needed some of the data if I could get it back.

When I took the panel off the bottom to remove it the hard drive had come out of the connector. I assume it had been dropped, knocked off the table or something of that sort. I plugged it back in, turned on the machine and it booted up. Since that took care of the first problem I tried a few things and the machine seemed to stop responding. I didn’t know if there was a problem from the initial disconnect of the drive or what. It was acting strange with the anti virus (Avast) so I uninstalled it and scanned for spyware and malware, there were a few so I removed those, then I did an online scan at Trend Micro which said it was clean at which point I downloaded a fresh copy of Avast and installed it.

So now the machine is clean of viruses, spyware and malware but it still kept hanging up, taking a long time to do anything so I looked at what was loading at startup and found there were a lot of things loading. Since I didn’t install the programs I had to determine what was actually needed (my rule of thumb is if it will load when I open the program I don’t need it to be running all the time) so I started disabling startup programs and the machine started working much better.

Most problems end up not being hardware. I don’t work on computers much anymore but the main thing I find when I do is spyware and malware, startup processes, a fragmented hard drive or something along those lines.

Most of the software I use for those things are linked from the anti virus page at http://www.tnt-computer.com/virus.html

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