buckdog05

Thank you very much for your help. The laptop doesn't seem to act any differently when it's plugged in or on battery, but when I tried unplugging it I think the drive was also working when it was plugged in. I might try seeing if the drive works after waiting 30 minutes at the BIOS screen, thanks!

Hello! My mom is having an issue with her Toshiba Satellite L305-S5907 laptop where sometimes the optical drive only opens and works after she restarts the laptop. It is running Windows 7 Ultimate. The drive appears to work fine after the computer is restarted but seemingly randomly stops working. When I pressed the button on the drive before restarting today, the light flashed on the drive but it did not open, and it did not read a disk when I used a paperclip to open the drive. Soon after restarting about 10 minutes ago, the drive worked but when I just tested it again, it did not work. Do you have any idea what could be causing this issue? Thanks!

I just installed Windows Vista SP2 from a CD Rom onto a Dell computer I had restored to factory settings. It said that SP2 installed successfully, but when I go into the update history, the majority of the updates on the day that I installed Sp2 show up as "failed." Is this OK since the computer does have SP2 and shows it when I go into the "properties" for the computer or should I try to reinstall SP2 or the failed updates? Thanks!

Thank you very much for the suggestion, her computer actually is in an older house. I might have a power supply lying around that I can try, thanks again!

Never mind, I thnk it's fixed after disabling the windows sidebar and Dell Dock. Thanks!

On a Dell Inspiron 530S with Windows Vista Home Premium 64 bit, sometimes after closing programs on the computer the desktop icons can no longer be clicked on. The start menu works as well as the quick launch icons, and logging off and back on again fixes the problem. This seems to happen when especially if not exclusively when closing Internet Explorer before it fully loads. I have updated the video drivers and googled to no avail and was wondering if anyone has any tips. Thanks!

Memory test is great idea, I'm reluctant to buy new parts but replacing PSU is also good idea, thanks.

When I was there last week I did not see the problem, although Windows would not even boot then. After turning the computer and having it turn itself off four times, she is back to the endless loop of windows startup error screens, I assume because of damage done by inproper shutdowns. It's a different issue for me because I don't think I'll be able to see symptoms without getting Windows working, which will take too long for me to do at her house.

I opened up the computer at her house and looked for a cable in the fan and didn't see one, but I guess the cables could have transported in transportation. It's an AMD Dual Core CPU. Can you think of any reason besides bad luck that it would have worked perfectly here and not at her house? I was thinking dust, but that seems far-fetched. Thank you!

I have been working on an HP desktop computer with Windows XP that was shutting down on it's on during use and had gotten to the point where it wouldn't even boot into Windows because it was stuck in an infinate loop of choosing "last known good configuration" or "normal startup." I took the computer to my house and fixed the endless loop with a chkdsk /r and the computer seemed to be working perfectly. I left it on for a long time, played a video on Hulu, upgraded the antivirus program, and noticed no problems on the computer. I returned the computer to it's owner and she called me saying that the computer was turning off again after getting very loud. This sounds like a heatsink or fan problem to me, but I do not understand why the computer would work perfectly at my house and then stop working at hers. Also, before she was complaining of a clicking noise and said that she could only get the computer to work when it was on its side which does not seem as much like a heatsink problem. I'm trying to determine if replacing the heatsink is worth it or if I should recommend a new computer. The computer has a dual-core processor and a gig of ram. Thank you for your help!

I am trying to implement a macro in Excel so that when certain cells are not filled in the worksheet pops up an error saying they must be filled in before the user advances to the next worksheet in the workbook. I tried to do this with data validation in Excel, but I would like to save the worksheet with a blank cell and have the error message come up after the user worksheet is being used, not when I am editing it. In other words, I can't leave the cell blank after deleting data from it because I get the same error that the users would get. We want the sheet to work like a web site that requires certain fields to be filled in. I figure that I need to use a macro to accomplish what I'm trying to but perhaps not? Thanks in advance!