New
#1
HP Pavillion notebook reboots continously except in Safe Mode
This is a family member's computer and she asked me to help her fix it. It will only stay booted in Safe Mode. When I start the computer, it boots up, stays booted for a few mintues, then the screen goes black and it reboots. This keeps happening unless it is booted in Safe Mode.
History:
Purchased with Vista; I clean installed Windows 7 Home Premium (I know it's legit, bought it for her myself) when Windows 7 first came out.
When I turned it on, it rebooted so I started it in Safe mode and have tried/found the following problems:
· It had 4 adware programs and one trojan horse; removed those with Malwarebytes. Rescanned with Malwarebytes and MS Security Essentials, came out clean
· Device manager showed two problems - bad drivers for co-processor and bad drivers for Graphics card. installed those drivers and the Device Manager did not show anything wrong. Problem keeps happening.
· Opened BIOS and ran both Hard Drive and Memory Diagnostics; no problems found, Did not make any BIOS changes (I have little experience with BIOS)
· Ran diagnostics with Windows 7 disk; including Repair, Memory Diagnostics; no problems found
· Graphics card is NVIDIA GeFroce 7150M/nforce 630M; reinstalled drivers, didn't help anything
· When the screen saver goes on, there is an error message, "The screen saver can't run because it requires a newer video card or one that's compatable with Direct 3D".
This is an old computer, well out of warranty.
Do I... still possibly have an embedded virus? What removal tool should I get?
Is it worth replacing the graphics card - if that's possible on an old laptop?
Should I try a clean install of Windows 7? Seems like if I have a hardware problem, this won't help.
Thank you.