went out, came home computer wont work at all.

Hey guys new member, first time poster, I usually can figure out my own problems and have never really been stumped but this problem has got me. It's taking a really long time to boot up, regular and safe mode, once it finally does boot, nothing works, i can navigate around some screens such as add remove programs, and some folders, but nothing works when i click on it.

I have booted into safe mode and launched auto repair with no results, I have launched system restore and it says there is no restore points. Windows defender won't activate, Norton security 16 wont launch, i tried booting to last good configuration and that did nothing, i'm literally out of ideas, it's driving me nuts, were coming on day 3 here and i don't know what to do,

Please is there anyone out there that can help, or has heard of anything like this?

ps-sometimes when i'm waiting for the desktop to appear after start up a white box pops up saying "please wait" i have never seen that before.

thanks.
Scott
Acer pc, windows 7 home premium

the last thing i was doing was watching social justice warrior fails on youtube, everything was fine then i went out and got groceries and came home, had supper went back to the computer and nothing worked, no one was in the house while we were gone, i'm not sure if i can reinstall because i bought my acer at "the source" and windows was installed and there was no disc in the box with the pc. I did expect to see restore points because anytime i need to use system restore to fix any issues i always have points to restore to, and "What have you done to evaluate your hardware---such as hard disk tests, evaluation of component voltages or temperatures, RAM testing", i don't know how to do any of this stuff,

as far as my fixing goes, is doing a system restore, booting into safe mode and doing a system restore or running a antivirus in safemode and that's always fixed all my problems and any problems on my parents computers,

i ran norton complete scan probably 4 days ago

i did find my way to that recover option you speak of but it said it will delete everything on my c drive and i have lots of pictures on there, so i was hesitant in going ahead with that, was hoping there would be another way, " the source" is like a staples, it's a chain, they used to be called radio shack. this really isn't looking good, thank goodness for my lap top.

Hey guys, back and signing in from the doomed computer, i been through heck and back and burned up alot of patience the last week with this thing and i finally think i got it or at least made incredible progress. so after the last time i logged on here , i restart the computer, let it sit for 6 hours, managed to get a scan with 360 total that took about 9 hours, and returned
75 registry items
9 temp files directory issues,
75 internet explorer issues ( i never use this)
and 30 issues with another area i can't recall atm.

so that allows me to limp on into safe mode with networking, i then continued to download and install avg, and keep in mind every action took hours, so i boot up into safe mode with networking this takes 4 hours, click on the internet it takes 2 hours for the internet to fire up, type in avg it takes 3 hours to return a search, click on avg it takes 2 hours to get into the page..... and so on and so fourth, took about 8 hours to install 1 program, so i go through,
-Avg
-ad aware
-malware bytes
-360 total security
-Norton 16
-Avast Free Antivirus
-Crap cleaner

And i'm battling away for days every motion taking pain staking hours and every time a search stopped it would have found over a hundred issues including registry and other areas, and so finally after i think 8 days but what feels like forever, i have a functioning computer operating at close to full speed. you wanna talk about a battle of the patience though,

From the symptoms you describe, sounds like your system HDD might be going bad. First, are you using a mechanical HDD or an SDD? If you are using an old style Hard Disk Drive, see if you can find Hiren's Boot CD, you can usually find a disk image you can burn, by Googling for it. If you can find it, burn it, then boot to that, look for "Dos Programs" and choose Hard Disk Programs. ON the 3rd page or so there is an app called GWscan, choose that, open it up and choose your system drive, first run a Smart check on it, then run a quick scan. If the drive is going bad, it will say READ ELEMENT FAILURE. You can sometimes fix this by running the extended scan, which will block out the bad sectors.

This is usually good enough to allow you time to dupe that drive onto a new HDD. But this PC I am using, it has done as you described about 5 times since I built it in 2006. Each time my HDD was showing read element failure and I replaced the drive, and this system is basically the same system which started out as Windows XP MCE, updated to Vista then 7 Ultimate.

I keep Hiren's on a small flash drive with some other tools saved on it, so I can run this at the first time of trouble.

If you can find a way of running GWscan, and it repairs your drive, you should then run CHKDSK (system drive letter): /x /r on that drive to check it further, should take about 3 or 4 hours. But running CHKDSK all by itself won't fix this.

If you have Western Digital drives, you can also use WDDIAG (the DOS version) to fix this. You can download it and burn it onto a bootable CD, I think they have an IOS image for you- I have one here I made from an ISO I found, WDDIAG uses the same engine as GWscan.

Not sure if this is best place to start - if not I'll try another post.
My wife's hp-pavilion, has a black screen. This was a problem a few months ago but did a restore and everything was okay. Now it suddenly went black. system appears to operate, lights on, just no light on screen.
As I remember there was a key(s) I could press and hold while starting up that would bring up safe mode. From there I could work my way through it.
Does any one know which keys?
Thanks,
Steve

steve7777 said:

Not sure if this is best place to start - if not I'll try another post.
My wife's hp-pavilion, has a black screen. This was a problem a few months ago but did a restore and everything was okay. Now it suddenly went black. system appears to operate, lights on, just no light on screen.
As I remember there was a key(s) I could press and hold while starting up that would bring up safe mode. From there I could work my way through it.
Does any one know which keys?
Thanks,
Steve

F8 will get you there.
HP Notebook PCs - Entering Safe Mode | HP(R) Customer Support