mikehende

well the problem I am facing here does not allow me to get to the Device Manager. Made a little progress, changed the IDE cable and now the pc recognizes the hard drives as I can see them listed in both POST and Bios, problem now is that after the POST I see the windows start up led going from left to right at the bottom of the screen but then I get a flash of a screen which appears to have some error messages but it doesn't stay on long enough for me to read what's on that page or screen, then the pc reboots itself repeatedly unless I manually shut it down, any ideas/fixes?

Let me ask another question, since I am taking a working HD out of a completely different pc with a different OS, do I have to change any settings or anything whether Bios or not "before" connecting the foreign HD to the other pc or can you simply switch or interchange HD's at will?

Problem here Bob, is that I tried "2" working hd's and when both were place back into their pc's I now get the same thing, the pc does not recognise both hd's, see why I have to believe now that the bios is infected? Your explanation suggests why the boot disks I created would not work but is there anyhting else I can try here seeing that I do not have another hd to try?

The pc does not recognise the drive and I get this prompt "No operating system found" I wish to use a floppy to load an anti-virus program to see if the bios was infected but how can I load an av program on 1.44 floppy disk?

I had come across this a while back but decided not to use it after reading all of the "cons" associated with it but thanks for the link/referrals!

Every Saturday I have to move my Desktop from inside of the house to the Garage out back and then back in when I am finished, I have been looking for some sort of apparatus that has a carrying handle for the Tower, any ideas/links please? Thanks.

No beeps and yes, I have switched MB's so I am pretty certain that the MB is gone on pc 2. I just need to know how I could have tested these parts if I did not have another indentical pc to swap parts? Also, you mentioned about the MSI Motherboard, my research does not say much about it, do you use this for testing Motherboards? How does it work?

After having fixed pc's for some time then I can understand a tech having spares to switch but what would a "new" tech do when someone brings a pc to him and he doesn't have these spares or if he has to fix at that person's home:confused: ?

The Video card and memory is good so I have to believe that it is the MB and that's what Dell told me last night. Thing is, how often does someone have the luxury of having duplicate parts or identical pc's to switch and test? There should be some tool that a person can use to test each part of a pc?

Shouldn't there be some way to "trace" this problem like when using a schematic or following and changing everything that has to do "only" with the signal going to the monitor? I can't believe that you would have to change everything in sight to find the problem?

ok, I will exchange the other parts besides the MB with the working one to test.

I have 2 old Dell Dimension XPS R400 desktops of which I am trying to make 1 out of the 2, when I boot up 1 of them [i will call this one pc 2], I don't get anything on the monitor and there aren't any beeps present. Any ideas what I should do from here please? Thanks. p.s. I switched the graphics cards from both pcs, still no screen on pc 2 and pc 2's card works on pc 1,is the motherboard fried on pc 2?

Yeah, installed easily but I did not have to do any special partitioning, used the new HD as a slave and store all of my mp3's and video files in there, thanks for asking and sorry I forgot to mention this here.

Ok, got it done, I used msconfig to locate the file then disabled it from startup, next used Regclean to clean out the Registry.

I think I may have made some progress but I need a little help [obviously], I just ran a search using the letters IMG and it came up with 504 entries so I then looked for all "Applications" under the File Type to see if I can narrow this down and I came across one that reads IMGCLEAN which is located in C:\Windows, the pic or small image that is on the left of those letters is an image of a small rectangular box that has a bigger Red circle around it with a Red slash across it, sort of like a "stop" sign with a slash across it. I right clicked on it to see what options I have and then chose "Open" and the exact same prompt when windows is loading appears so I am guessing this is it, problem is, I don't know what to do with it from here. It's description when I move my mouse over it says Description:Uninstall Utility Company:Innovation Management Group, Inc. So I then searched the net for this Company and found their link, went to it http://www.imgpresents.com/ Judging by the date it was installed in my pc [8/9/2005]I am guessing that it was just some utility I may have experimented with once. So, what should I do from here? Simply Delete it?

I did this once a while back but forgot how to get to see which programs I have on startup and have th eoptions to select or deselect the startup options, I went to the start menu options but that's not it, any ideas please?

For a while now whenever I start my pc and windows is loading, a prompt comes up that reads IMG Utility This is a Setup/Uninstall utility. Use Setup or Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel. I then hit the "ok" button to close that box. I did not want to interfere with anything in the Control Panel that I am unsure of and since I don't see anything with IMG in there, I left it alone but now it's becoming a task that I have to do when windows is loading and so wish to finally get rid of it, any ideas on how to proceed from here to take care of that please? Thanks.

What about the "claw", multimeter, pin remover e.t.c that the pc courses recommend? Don't pc techs use these other stuff?

Can anyone recommend a good affordable set of tools that one can purchase specifically to fix any hardware parts in a pc please, I mean one like which a pc Tech would have to fix pc's? Thanks.

I "may" have found the problem, was on the Phone with the DSL people this morning and they had me move and connect the Modem directly to the main Phone box in the house which is in my bedroom and everything started working again, for now at least, I will have to give this a while before I am sold that this is the solution. At first, I had thought it was the Phone so I had the new phone replaced just in case it might have been defective but same problem with the replacement Motorola phone, then I had thought it might be the power strip so I replace that with an expensive one that was made especially for pc systems, next we thought it might have been the router so we replaced that with a new DLink wireless router, we then changed the filters too. After all this hardware change I was then convinced that it might be the new voicewing phone service that was the culprit but I could find no one who has that service and related problems. My wife then and still thinks that it may be either the 2 firewalls conflicting or a combination of all 3 things [modem, router and voicewing] that's conflicting somewhere. If we should still have the problems after this latest fix then we will have to look into those "conflict" issues. p.s. To answer your question Bob, the phone problems are not buzz, static or hums", it was always the phone cutting off or the connection breaking up or our answering machine not picking up or callers not getting our answering machine sometimes so the calls would go to to the online answering service.

I don't understand the difference between a worm and a virus, can anyone explain this please? Thanks.

We have been having a problem here with our phone and can't seem to solve it no matter what we try. We have had Verizon DSL ever since it started and a 2nd line for our phone, last year we got Verizon Voicewing service and soon after we started having all sorts of problems with our phone. We first thought that it was the Router becuase it was a few years old so we threw that in the trash and got a new DLink wireless Router, this all worked good for a few and then sma e problem all over again, when we call DLink for help, all of their tests turn out positive, the same for both the DSL and the Voicewing people so here we are dealing with 3 separate companies and can't get anywhere, something is conflicting somewhere between the 3 services. Can anyone give me any idea where to start to fix this problem please? P.S One major obstacle in fixing this problem is that the the phone interruptions is intermittent so that is why this problem is hard to track down, it's like your car is giving trouble and when you take it to a mechanic, it works fine, the guy can't fix a problem if it's not there right? How would you guys attack this problem?

Then this tells me NOT to take any chances, thanks. All is well again for him though, installed Norton ran a scan, turned up empty and his pc is working as normal again, he has to do the updates from his house, that's all.

Couldn't try out the partitioning here unfortunately because my cousin's HD which I am working on is only 20GB so you instructions helped already [thanks]. I will be getting a 160GB additonal HD for "my" pc next week and so will be asking a lot of questions here in an effort to make the best use of the 2 drives I will be using in my pc.

Simple fix, the wife told me to try installing a second time and it worked. Got one more question about this virus situation, I need to go on the net to install his av software but I am still worried about spreading any possible virus into my network system, what I'd like to ask is this, if I were to connect his pc directly to my modem bypassing my router [to which has my 3 pc's are hooked up to], is there ANY chance whatsoever that when I reconnect my router to the modem that I might get my pc's infected?