What's wrong with my wife's laptop?

[SLC Punk]

My wife was using her laptop today and it suddenly shutdown. It will now boot up and log into Vista, but it will automatically shut itself down after a minute or so. I vaguely remember a computer virus that would do this to computers. How do I fix it?

[reggie 00]

What type of laptop?

Plugged in or not

Will it boot into safe mode (F8)

Any beeps?

[MTL_4runner]

See if it will boot in safe mode first. If you think it's a virus you can also boot directly from a norton CD and have it scan everything before booting.

[garrett]

might be overheating

[MTL_4runner]

might be overheating


Very good point.

Get a can of compressed air and use it to clean out all the heatsinks.

[BruceTS]

mine did something very similar, it turned out to be a bad power supply. There was just enough battery power left that it would boot, but then die a few minutes later.

9 times out of 10 it's usually overheating and it needs to be blown out.

[SLC Punk]

Ok guys, I played with it last night and have some more info.
Its a Toshiba Laptop (Can't remember the model #, but its 9 mos old)
Running Windows Vista.
Plugged in.

It will boot up fine. Once it goes into Windows, I get this error: Windows Explorer has stopped working-Windows is checking for a solution. Then it says "restarting Explorer" It will cycle through these errors every 10 seconds.


I was able to run the virus scan, but only found a tracking cookie. I cannot get any files off because it will close the window when this error comes up.

[SLC Punk]

I found this on the internet. Sounds like it is pretty common. I am just not sure whose advice to take.

http://forums.microsoft.com/technet/showpost.aspx?postid=1272291&siteid=17&sb=0&d=1&at=7&ft=11&tf=0&pageid=0

[MTL_4runner]

I found this on the internet. Sounds like it is pretty common. I am just not sure whose advice to take.

http://forums.microsoft.com/technet/showpost.aspx?postid=1272291&siteid=17&sb=0&d=1&at=7&ft=11&tf=0&pageid=0


Yep, that's definately your issue, but you'll need to do some searching to figure out what was recently installed that forced the laptop to begin looping like that. If the system will let you do a rollback from the control panel, then that might be the fastest way to get it back to normal. You could also run spybot in safemode to make sure that it's not some malicious spyware causing your issue.

Here's another thread on it:
http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1203710&SiteID=17

[SLC Punk]

I couldn't find the issue. My wife ended up having someone take a look at it and he couldn't find where the problem was. We had not added any programs. He ran a spyware and was unsuccessful. He ended up installing a new Hard Drive.