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Reinstallation on laptop
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
in General Chat
On monday my laptop randomly stopped working, I could log in as normal but nothing worked, no icons would open, couldn't bring up the start menu or anything.
Did a reinstallation using the discs that came with the laptop, laptop now works however the appearance is different (everything much bigger, resolution is crap) and we keep getting weird messages when we log in, something to do with 'skins' and we have 0 memory left on our c drive (recovery) and no my computer icon on the desktop or anything.
We only bought the laptop on 30th May from PC World but they said we have invalidated the warranty by using the reinstallation discs (even though they were provided with the laptop) so they wont repair it for us without a fee.
Anyone know what we can do other than pay for someone to fix it? Any IT gurus who can recommend something?
Did a reinstallation using the discs that came with the laptop, laptop now works however the appearance is different (everything much bigger, resolution is crap) and we keep getting weird messages when we log in, something to do with 'skins' and we have 0 memory left on our c drive (recovery) and no my computer icon on the desktop or anything.
We only bought the laptop on 30th May from PC World but they said we have invalidated the warranty by using the reinstallation discs (even though they were provided with the laptop) so they wont repair it for us without a fee.
Anyone know what we can do other than pay for someone to fix it? Any IT gurus who can recommend something?
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Chances are the recovery disc is just a vanilla XP disc without any of the laptop-specific drivers to make things work. What make is the laptop? Usually if you go to the manufacturer's website and go to their support pages you can enter the model and download all the appropriate drivers to make the screen the right size and make other bits work. lemmie know if you need some help tho
make sure you backup all your stuff, it might be that you'll need to do a clean install.
:no:
Dell I have never had issues with either, though the people I know who have had issues, have mostly been because of customer service when something has gone wrong.
Funnily enough, with Acer, they sometimes encourage their customers to perferm a reformat to rule out software issues before sending their laptops back to Acer. Even though PC World insisted on the opposite, I think you'll find that Dell themselves will actually have the same stance as Acer.
Worked when I did it, or maybe that was just Vista.
Yeah Vista / Windows 7 generally has slightly better out the box suppot for 3rd party hardware, and the online driver search actually (sort-of) works.. but there's no reason you cant just go to device manager and reinstall the driver there, afaik it should still attempt a driver search without having to do a full reinstall