Hello! Made an account for my problems. So, this little story begins a few months back.
In October, I dropped my Win7 laptop while it was still running. This created a scratch on the disk (confirmed by an outside data recovery center) which I sent to Dell to replace.
Dell sent me back what I strongly suspect is the same hard disk, with a simple reformatting done to reinstall Windows. At least, that's what the sheet of "Performed actions" on the Dell data sheet said.
Throughout the next couple of months, I get a few BSODs, but nothing ever happened except for a forced reboot. These all said "Kernel Page Inflow Error", or something to that effect, but I couldn't see any changes in the function of the computer, so I wrote it off as effects of the scratched disk, and figured I'd use it anyway.
Then, one day, I got a forced reboot and the computer was deathly slow.
I proceeded to run a medley of chkdsk, system restore, and forced driver updates, and somehow it returned to normal.
This was a few weeks ago.
Now, a few days ago, I got a different BSOD. In the midst of my browsing, I came across a Java Applet that wasn't loading - the entire page the applet was on stayed white and refused to load. After tinkering with Java settings for a bit, I decided a clean install would solve everything.
How pitifully wrong I was. Mid-uninstall, I got hit with a BSOD, this time with a Bad Pool Header error code. The computer was deathly slow again, chkdsk, system restore, etc. etc. I got it to work again, and I decided that the root of my problems ( at least this time around) might be Java. Thus, I created a system restore point, and uninstalled my 64-bit Java successfully. Heartened, I then began to uninstall 32-bit. BOOM. Blue screen. Ah well, nothing I didn't expect. Then I tried to use system restore, when I get an error message saying that System Restore was unable to extract a file. Oh dear. I get a host of bad clusters and files in chkdsk, and my system restore points all faced problems extracting a certain file, something in Sys32/catroot. The system restore state that I had gotten from my external hard drive was, I think, corrupted, due to an imaging on a later date that got halted mid-process, so that didn't solve my problems, AND it put me back a couple of programs.
I'm thinking I'm just going to reinstall Windows, or order a new hard disk, reinstall windows on THAT, and still have the old disk to copy program files/settings/activation codes/personal files/etc. However, I'd like to be able to milk a little more use out of this thing if possible. Should I bother?
So specifically, the problem I have currently is a general lagginess of my system, along with random performance issues in a host of different programs (e.g. nVidia experience can't connect to the internet despite an internet connection and no blocks in my firewall, graphics tablet driver isn't functioning, etc.)
On a related note, I have a copy of Windows 7 as part of my school's software licensing. Would an install of that be able to automatically detect all my hardware (i.e. motherboard/GPUs/RAM/processor) without me having to do anything explicitly? I'm sort of worried about me having two GPUs (the Intel on-board processor and my nVidia), as well as the default Dell programs things that came with the factory install.
In October, I dropped my Win7 laptop while it was still running. This created a scratch on the disk (confirmed by an outside data recovery center) which I sent to Dell to replace.
Dell sent me back what I strongly suspect is the same hard disk, with a simple reformatting done to reinstall Windows. At least, that's what the sheet of "Performed actions" on the Dell data sheet said.
Throughout the next couple of months, I get a few BSODs, but nothing ever happened except for a forced reboot. These all said "Kernel Page Inflow Error", or something to that effect, but I couldn't see any changes in the function of the computer, so I wrote it off as effects of the scratched disk, and figured I'd use it anyway.
Then, one day, I got a forced reboot and the computer was deathly slow.
I proceeded to run a medley of chkdsk, system restore, and forced driver updates, and somehow it returned to normal.
This was a few weeks ago.
Now, a few days ago, I got a different BSOD. In the midst of my browsing, I came across a Java Applet that wasn't loading - the entire page the applet was on stayed white and refused to load. After tinkering with Java settings for a bit, I decided a clean install would solve everything.
How pitifully wrong I was. Mid-uninstall, I got hit with a BSOD, this time with a Bad Pool Header error code. The computer was deathly slow again, chkdsk, system restore, etc. etc. I got it to work again, and I decided that the root of my problems ( at least this time around) might be Java. Thus, I created a system restore point, and uninstalled my 64-bit Java successfully. Heartened, I then began to uninstall 32-bit. BOOM. Blue screen. Ah well, nothing I didn't expect. Then I tried to use system restore, when I get an error message saying that System Restore was unable to extract a file. Oh dear. I get a host of bad clusters and files in chkdsk, and my system restore points all faced problems extracting a certain file, something in Sys32/catroot. The system restore state that I had gotten from my external hard drive was, I think, corrupted, due to an imaging on a later date that got halted mid-process, so that didn't solve my problems, AND it put me back a couple of programs.
I'm thinking I'm just going to reinstall Windows, or order a new hard disk, reinstall windows on THAT, and still have the old disk to copy program files/settings/activation codes/personal files/etc. However, I'd like to be able to milk a little more use out of this thing if possible. Should I bother?
So specifically, the problem I have currently is a general lagginess of my system, along with random performance issues in a host of different programs (e.g. nVidia experience can't connect to the internet despite an internet connection and no blocks in my firewall, graphics tablet driver isn't functioning, etc.)
On a related note, I have a copy of Windows 7 as part of my school's software licensing. Would an install of that be able to automatically detect all my hardware (i.e. motherboard/GPUs/RAM/processor) without me having to do anything explicitly? I'm sort of worried about me having two GPUs (the Intel on-board processor and my nVidia), as well as the default Dell programs things that came with the factory install.