[Tokxick]

Well hello there. Lemme thank you for viewing this topic, and hopefully... helping me solve a problem. Okay, so I have a gateway laptop, windows XP Professional Edition.. and it has... quite a few issues. Its a few years old, and for one... it is completely broken. I mean seriously, it is broken. Not broken where it won't play music.. its completely obliterated. Here's how it goes.Well, not that long of a story. I used to be completely moronic, and used Kazaa, which as most of you know... sucks. It practically blew up my computer, infected it with plenty of trojans, malware, a virus (which managed to also tear up my gaming card), and adware/spyware coming out of its fan.Okay, so next part. Stupid me.. I didn't have any antivirus, anti malware.. in fact.. i don't know if the useless windows firewall was on. So what happens is I delete ever file in there, and start downloading ad-aware (cheap me.. didn't even buy software), spybot, and loaded myself with freeware. So it removed all the nasties... but the computer worked like a windows 88. It was horrible. So then i remember 'Oh yea! I'll just reformatt the dang thing.' And I did... only problem was, even through the reformatting when through every stage of the process.. down to the screen you see when you first open a new computer.. when i was done.. there it was again. Completely unchanged. Absolutely nothing gone from before I had reformatted. I even had the same Halo 2 (you know.. the desert sand one.. gotta love it) wallpaper. So I am just purely frustrated. Before I pawn this (of course.. telling the pawn shop owner that if he doesn't test it out.. i'll let him drop a hundred bucks from price), I decided to have one last go and ask you people. If you can help.. you are my saviour.. and if you can't.. you are still awesome for attempting.So.. in short.. what should I do to get it working again?

[Cosmo]

Do you have the full XP disc, or a recovery cd? If you have the full disc, format the hd and install from there. If you don't, and only have the recovery cd, check to see if you have the option of a "factory restore." I don't think everyone has it, but it'll erase everything, re-install the os, so you can start over.If you don't have factory restore, than your best bet is to1 Buy a virus scan ($20-$50) and scan at startup2 Download antimalware software (ie: Spybot search and destroy, lavasoft adaware SE personal), update the defenitions, and run the scan3 Reformat with the recovery cd.

[Tokxick]

I'll try that.,.. thanks!

[matchbox2022]

There may be a few viruses infecting your computer at start up and changing data around at each stratup, that would explain why a format didn't work. You can try the software but if that doesnt work. Get a new laptop, or if it turns out to be cheaper, a new laptop hard drive and install with the recovery cds. That'll guarentee it. Oh, and dont use kazaa, if the devil was a program, kazaa would be it. try t o r r e n t s cough cough im not sure if im allowed to say that on here since it may not be enitrely legal at times, lets call it lemon marangue pie eh?