I woke up this morning and I see that my desktop image has reverted to and old photo that I had, and I lost all downloads and music files, etc, that I have downloaded in the past few weeks. where did everything go?
I am using a brand new HP laptop with windows 7, I just bought it.
thanks in advance.
Welcome!
First, try a system restore.
After your changes are restored (if they are), run a virus scan. Download Malwarebytes and run a Full scan.
Is this a common problem, does Windows 7 do this automatically?
No not a common problem. If you read Jon's reply he thinks that it may be a virus and so do I. If your ran the anti virus and the malwarebytes, and came up clean you are ok.
Sometimes there can be a power fluctation or other problem during boot etc, than can cause corruption that must be fixed. Many times it is the A/V that is used that creates the problems. After this is fixed used Microsoft Secutity Essentisals as the A/v
System restore may not help because it does not restore user files. But your restore points can be put to use. Run Shadow Explorer, go to a restore point from yesterday or the day before, navigate to the files/folders in question (e.g. something like this: C:\Users\your name\Pictures), right click on the folder and Export.
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