Metropol

I've knackered my laptop. When i turn it on it gets to the microsoft corporation load up bit then stops and goes pixallated. I can get into the bios, i've fiddled about but i can't fix it. I have no recovery disc for Vista.
Any of you have a fool proof quick fix i can use in bios to atleast load the basic drivers please.
I've tried it in safe mode, to no avail. Another important bit of info.. I have been known to use the main on switch as an off switch.

I'm using my mums laptop ( for a limited time only) at the mo.

Sorry I don't have a response. I hope you can get it sorted. It just raises the point: it's a really good job you have access to another computer. For many people, they only have one computer and if that goes down, they don't have another one to use in the meantime.

Computers are so great when they work, but when they don't...

If your mum has windows vista sp1 on her laptop, you can create a recovery disk from that:

start > all programs > maintenance > create recovery disc

or if you can't find it there, start > run > recdisc

you can boot from this and hopefully recovery your system to a working state - it's probably going to be your only option other than a clean install - which you won't be able to do from that disk.

i'm not sure what brand your laptop is, but many of the big oems will stick a recovery parition on the disk which you can initialise by hitting a specific function key (i know for sure that new acer and hp compaq have this) so all may not be lost.

what is the make/model of your laptop?

Thanks Mark. I'll give that a go. My laptop is an Acer, my mums is an Toshiba.

I had a similar headache this weekend.

My nephew has gifted me a little compact PC - very nice actually.

http://www.misco.co.uk/applications/Sea ... CatId=3002

So, he's swiped a PCI graphics card out of it, the hard drive and the RAM, but left me the multi-core processor.

I rebuilt it with existing components I had, and couldn't get it to fire up. After several hours I managed to find out that there's a jumper setting on the motherboard which needs to be changed to tell it to allow the onboard graphics to function. Then I rebuilt again and gave it another whirl.

Nothing.

Eventually, only by reading the poorly written FAQs for other products do I learn that it requires DDR2 667/800 RAM instead of the 5300 stuff. Disappointing, as I had 4Gb of the wrong RAM at the ready. There was no error beep or anything to warn me of a mismatched module, and it really was by luck I found this particular answer. Even the Misco link above "recommends" the wrong type of RAM for the item.

Anyhoo, its on order now, so I'll be playing with it come the weekend, although I'll have some work to do as I had reset the CMOS in the hope that would default it back to the onboard graphics.

Obviously no help at all within the context thread; I just thought I'd tell you.