I need PC help

[mikedudley17]

If anyone out there has a vast knowledge of PCs, I need your help. My PC took an unexpected dive. I am now stuck using the work pc. But here is the jist of whats wrong:

I booted my laptop today only to find that the wifi net was down so i said oh well, listened to some tunes, and then jumped on the work pc to come on here. The work pc uses a diff. network. There are 2 networks in the building, ones wireless and one is all state net. details. anywho, i decided to clean up my desktop a lil on my laptop so i put some icons away in different folders all of which were created by me and not modifying any programs or anything like that. jumped back on the work pc, purused the net for a while then decided i wanted to play a game i had on my laptop. i click on the game and i get a error message saying: "This file does not have a program associated with it for performing this action. Creat an association in the Folder Options control panel." I was like WTF? try again. same thing. i click on windows media player and same thing. every program i click on does this. ok, no big deal, ill do a system restore. i get the same ****in message. damn. i reboot the pc and press F8 and attempt to do a system restore from safe mode. again same message. i reboot, press F8 and try to load pc from the "last known good configuration." and it loads back to a still ****ed up state, only this time all the programs that used to load up when starting windows ie antivirus and such dont even load up. no programs will operate and the pc wont let me do a system restore. can anyone help me??? please??? i dont have money for a new laptop. btw im runnin windows XP.

[khan4rtist]

sounds like some of your file associations are corrupted...a very rare problem that ive ran into working for firedog at circuit city. you're running windows xp correct?

here's the fix for it http://www.dougknox.com/index.html

on the menu to the left, click on "Win XP Fixes", then scroll down and find "File Association Fixes" and choose the extensions that are giving you the problems and it should fix it

[mikedudley17]

sounds like some of your file associations are corrupted...a very rare problem that ive ran into working for firedog at circuit city. you're running windows xp correct?

here's the fix for it http://www.dougknox.com/index.html

on the menu to the left, click on "Win XP Fixes", then scroll down and find "File Association Fixes" and choose the extensions that are giving you the problems and it should fix it

how do i administer these fixes when i cant open any program on my pc? seriously, i cant open any internets, media player, calculator, nothing. i was told to do a paralell installation of windows xp on the pc. you heard of this? i gotta google it to figure out what it is exactly.

[mikedudley17]

sounds like some of your file associations are corrupted...a very rare problem that ive ran into working for firedog at circuit city. you're running windows xp correct?

here's the fix for it http://www.dougknox.com/index.html

on the menu to the left, click on "Win XP Fixes", then scroll down and find "File Association Fixes" and choose the extensions that are giving you the problems and it should fix it

how do i administer these fixes when i cant open any program on my pc? seriously, i cant open any internets, media player, calculator, nothing. i was told to do a paralell installation of windows xp on the pc. you heard of this? i gotta google it to figure out what it is exactly.

[ontarian_frog]

Insert cd into drive, select install windows xp, then select repair install. Something along those lines, you won't have to format and won't loose any files.

[khan4rtist]

try downloading the file assosiation fixes from another computer and burn them onto a cd or a flash drive

make sure you download the .exe extention fix, its the most important one

[B1rdbrain]

STOP DO NOT DO THAT all you need to do is go in and back the date up or restart like it was a few days ago before any problems. step 1 hit start step 2 go to control pannel step 3 Perfomance and mantinace stap 4 System Restore Click on restore to an earlier date choose a day before you downloaded your last stuff. that could have the problem. that is all. you will lose anything you did after the restore date but it will take care of it then when done Defrag the hard drive. i know this cuz i got a nasy virus from limewire one day and that fixed it right quick.

[mikedudley17]

STOP DO NOT DO THAT all you need to do is go in and back the date up or restart like it was a few days ago before any problems. step 1 hit start step 2 go to control pannel step 3 Perfomance and mantinace stap 4 System Restore Click on restore to an earlier date choose a day before you downloaded your last stuff. that could have the problem. that is all. you will lose anything you did after the restore date but it will take care of it then when done Defrag the hard drive. i know this cuz i got a nasy virus from limewire one day and that fixed it right quick.

anything i try to open brings about that message. ANYTHING, short of bringing up the start menu. i am going to try and do the paralell installation of XP now...

[nevian]

Did you try to start the windows in safe mode?
when you boot after the bios screen press F8 and the boot menu will apear, chooze safe mode whithout networking, then find out which programs are on the start up list, try the system restore, see if this helps and scan your pc for malware too.
Now if this is not working i think you shood do a repair install on XP, that is easy first you set up bios to boot from cd rom, then you put the XP instalation disk folow the messages as they show up it will say that another instalation of XP is detected and it will ask you what to do, now you need to choose to repair the existing one instead of new, next thing you need to know is that it will apear as it is makeing a new instalation but without the format screen, don't worry it's normal and all the setings will be as they were before. so Good Luck pal

[AveoRob]

Mike,

What is the status of this. One thing I can tell you is that system restore is not a good idea. Sometimes(mostly) it messes it up more. A parallel install is an install into another directory, effectivly a fresh install. You will not lose data, but will have to reinstall all of your programs to make the proper registry changes, etc. You will also have to move you data from the original install to the new parallel install. This could be the result of a virus, so you may want to consider backing up the data and reformatting the drive and do a clean install. If you cannot recover the files via safe mode, there are utilities that boot from a CD or flash drive that will access the drive. Give us an update.