Can anyone help me with my laptop? (1 Viewer)

[Andi0390]

Hi,

I was just wondering if someone people could give me some advice with my laptop. I'm not a computery person at all, so while I can use my computer proficiently, I cannot fix many problems.

Its a Toshiba laptop M200 PSMC0A and I think its a 2007 model, although it could be 2006 but I am pretty sure its not. I bought it mid 2007 and it was a middle - bottom range laptop. Its got 1.5GB RAM and running Vista.

Generally its been fine, I don't often use virus protection software, but I don't go to many bad sites, and to compensate I wipe it every 4 -5 months and start all over again.

Recently its gone pretty bad. It freezes often (which is never used to do) and I have to turn it of at the button and often many individual programs freeze up. It will not read burnt CDs or burn CDs, but it will generally read purchased official dvds and cds, although not very well, and freezes often. I have tried playing dvds on the Toshiba player as well as VLC and I have problems with both. My usb drives work on and off. Often my wireless doesn't detect wireless networks or won't turn on, sometimes I have to reboot it for it to connect.

When all this started happening I backed everything up onto my external hard drive and factory restored it, but even before I had put any programs on, or even connected to the internet, it froze up. Now its still doing all these things, and its usable, but far from ideal. Does anyone know what is wrong with it and how I could fix it? Is it a fixable thing?

Thank you for any help,

Andi

 

[Omie Jay]

completely format, restore to factory settings, and re-install drivers (you should've gotten a disc with ur laptop with drivers)

 

[Gibbatron]

Probably these ^^ unless your hard drive has been damaged or something

 

[AsyLum]

I'd see if you could get a hold of Windows XP as well, as your laptop is probably in the lower half of the Vista requirements, or try out Windows 7 if you can get that, you should see a nice speed increase after the format.

 

[Andi0390]

I've put XP on my laptop before it as it came with only 512mb and Vista, but I had no way of getting drivers for anything. My house mate back then was a computery person and mucked around looking for drivers so I could run XP or Ubuntu but apparently I could not. While I thoroughly despised Vista at the beginning, I have grown accustomed to it, but if given the choice I guess I would try not to have due to all the problems it just seems to cause.

My computer did not come with any driver disk, although it has a program that allows me to burn a recovery disk which allows me to return it to 'factory settings' by reformatting portions on hard drive or something like that. This is what I did about a week ago and it improved nothing. While virus protection can be important, I have not used protection for two years and this has not caused any lasting problems for me, and I had thought that whenever I reformat it would remove all viruses.

Also, slightly OT, but if I were planning on buying a computer, would it be worth waiting for Windows 7 to come out? Or will it take a fair while for the base computers to be run on Windows 7? I was thinking about buying one within the next three months if these problems don't fix, but I would like a better OS. I am not Mac literate, and do not plan to become one of those people, although they are pretty and seemingly better.

Thanks for all advice so far.

 

[babikakez]

Maybe look into adding more RAM. I think I have an earlier version of your laptop and had a similar problem. Adding an extra 2GB of RAM really helped.