• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

Win XP troubles

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.

Lance Thornton

Member
Joined
Mar 3, 2002
Location
North of the Manatee River.
Hi all

I have a laptop with WinXP that has crashed. It has something to do with the ATI display drivers, so bad in fact that I cannot get into safe mode. I reinstalled XP overwriting system files only in the hopes that I could get by with that. The trouble is that I can't get to any of her programs that are on the disk. I can see them but there are no shortcuts in the program files menu. Is there any way around this? Thanks in advance.
 
Well, my friends laptop was also a HP. It also hung on the ATI driver loading Windows. I was reformatting it for her about once or twice a week, it would only last a couple of days until the problem came back. Turned out to be some intermittent hardware fault. If it's still under waranty I'd get it checked out.
 
Are you in under an administrator account, do you know how to check the accounts and how to take ownership of the drive?
 
Sorry to take awhile, Ive got a bit going on here. I would try and log in under the admin account and see if she still has her account intact under her old user name and then I would go to the users accounts settings in the control panel and change her account type to administrator, unless she already is that way. This is just so that she can get anything she needs done after you give her the system back. I think you will be able to see and click on those dead links after you do this. See which ones are actually dead.

I think if you replaced the registry when you replaced the system files that you lost all your links to your shortcuts and in some cases a lot of your installed programs are not going to work correctly, so you will have to reinstall them. The good news is all the saved stuff, like all her word files, etc, are going to be usable after that and you will get new links in your program group. You may need to click on each program, as some of them may work or re-associate.

As far as taking ownership of the drive, I'm not sure if you need this if you change her account to administrator, but if you get any prompts about not having permission to access anything when logged into her account after you changed it, post back. Hope this helps.
 
Back