Right, the wife's laptop appears to have died a very horrible semi-death - it works but has no network connectivity wired or wireless. Moving through the system everything appears to be in order but I can't make any changes to the network settings - ipconfig is also gubbed - tells me there is an internal error.
Wireless connection is just not working and the wired claims to be connected but isn't seeing any other PCs and the other PC's can't see it). I'm about to run Malware removal software on it but anything else I can do manually to try and get this slowly back online?
It's a Toshiba of about 4 years old...Rapport was installed on it but I think I've disabled it - this seems to be something RBS is pushing to it's online customers to offer protection from malware and viruses - seems to hog 97% of system resource and do nothing else...so it's een 'disabled' but I can't remove it as apparently even with Admin access I have insufficient rights to remove it.
Cheers.
If it's running XP use winsockxpfix.
Thanks will get my hands on that tonight and give it a bash.
If you've got the disc,reformat the hard drive and do clean reinstall,having saved settings to optical disc.then run malwarebytes and virus checker over optical disc before restoring settings.If this doesn't work,then probable fubar.
Ian
optical disc - you mean an external hard drive? I'm going to be doing that shortly - if I can't fix this myself...going to backup all the data from the machine - then plug it into a second machine and virus scan/malware scan it and see if the data is ok. I'll then rebuild the laptop after a few reformats of the drive/a few fdisks and also some partitions being created and then removed...also need to find a way to kill the FAT settings so the drive is back to how it was when brand new...then rebuild the machine and then restore the data.
This all seems a bit overkill just to get TCP/IP working! If your network card is broken then a re-install will not make any difference.
Click on Start, Run, type CMD and then type netsh winsock reset from the Dos prompt (this is assuming you are running XP SP2).
Why not just do a repair install? About 3 hours less hassle...
Also let me know if you need a OS disk - I have an MSDN sub from work so can grab an ISO and stick it in the post today if needed.
Mr Miller - you know where I live! 😉 The laptop is running XP SP3 and was updated with latest drivers and stuff from Windows Update about 3 weeks ago (and then 2.5 weeks ago it went belly-up.
Wireless network is just point balnk refusing to work - it tells me I have a wireless card and it is working but it refused to connect to anything; Wired network tells me it is connected to the network but I can't view any other devices on the network.
From what I can tell, I think it has some sort of nasty Spyware or infection that has corrupted the networking settings on the machine so although we have a wired and wireless connection, they aren't playing ball.
I'm needing to reset everything so that it removes whatever settings it has so I can reinstate them and start again - as I think the rest of the OS is fine.
However a repair install sounds like a blooming good plan as I'm guessing that will reinstall all the XP parts without loosing any data? If so, I'll give that a bash!
However a repair install sounds like a blooming good plan as I'm guessing that will reinstall all the XP parts without loosing any data? If so, I'll give that a bash!
It should in 99% of the time - I have only seen it fail once but that was a very broken system! I would do a backup anyway if you dont have one and give it a shot. It will also need to re-install any updates after its complete but application and user data should be preserved.
Basic MS steps here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/helpandsupport/learnmore/tips/doug92.mspx
Although I'm sure you know what you are doing! Seriously let me know if you need any media - I'm out the next few nights so can't pop over (Eddie Izzard tonight!) but can send stuff no bother. Also depending on how Fiona's uncle is I may be out at the weekend for a ride - although if he is well enough we will be visiting him (he only has a few months left sadly).
Its actually been over a month since I was mountain biking. 🙁
