Newbie Needs Help Please

Question

Hi. I have a Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop running Vista Home Premium SP2, Mobile AMD Sempron Processor 3600+, 2.0 GB RAM, ATI Radeon Xpress 1150. I downloaded ImgBurn (and have since uninstalled it) so I could get information on the laptop filters. I know nothing about filters, but thought having that information available might be of some help:

Filter Driver Load Order - ImgBurn v2.5.0.0

===============================================

Upper Device Filter: [None Found]

Upper Class Filter: GEARAspiWDM

Device: CD/DVD-ROM Device

Lower Class Filter: PxHelp20

Lower Device Filter: [None Found]

Filter Name: GEARAspiWDM

File Name: C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\GEARAspiWDM.sys

File Version: 2.02.00.01 [2.2.0.1]

File Description: CD DVD Filter

Product Name: CD DVD Filter

Product Version: 2.02.00.01 [2.2.0.1]

Company Name: GEAR Software Inc.

Copyright: Copyright (C) GEAR Software Inc. 1997-2009

Filter Name: PxHelp20

File Name: C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\PxHelp20.sys

File Version: 3.00.41a [3.0.41.0]

File Description: Px Engine Device Driver for Windows 2000/XP

Product Name: PxHelp20

Product Version: [2.0.0.0]

Company Name: Sonic Solutions

I use my laptop for website development, e-mail, and correspondence and MS Office programs. I have tried to use it to burn CDs and DVDs and various programs and I now fear it's messed things up beyond what I know how to fix. Please help.

The most pressing thing that concerns me is this morning, when I turned on the laptop I saw a gray box saying this: "Dell Wireless WLAN Card Network Tray Applet has stopped working." I Googled the term to learn more, and some forums said it could be very bad. One response said to do the following steps:

Right click on Computer
Go to Manager
Go to Services
Find Dell Wireless WLAN
Right click on that
Go to Properties
Disable it or uninstall it
Reboot laptop and all should be ok

Should I do this? Could anything go wrong?

Other related problems that I've had for a while are a) I cannot burn CDs or DVDs no matter what. The burner is still relatively new and was a replacement for a previously defective one sent to me by Dell maybe one year ago. It has worked to burn DVDs sometimes and can play just fine. But when I try to burn CDs and DVDs now, it just keeps saying to put media into the tray even after I put in a brand new blank Verbatim or Sony blank CD or DVD. b) The laptop stalls when I turn it on, most of the time. It will stop at the introduction/start-up screen and I often have to press Control + Alt + Delete in order to try again at the screen where I click on the picture of either me or my wife in order to start the laptop up. c) Finally, some time ago, I updated from Internet Explorer 7 to the newest one and it seems to have created security problems. It started the laptop slowing down at the start-up screen and for a while, I could not use IE8. It would not open unless I clicked on the IE icon and chose "Run as administrator" for a while. Now it works normally, but I don't know why. When I tried to download FIrefox, it would download it but I could not open the browser. It would always crash.

Can someone please help me get my laptop back to normal and fix the main issues? I was laid off from my job a few months ago and don't have money to take the latptop into a shop, but I use it every day to do websites for people and look for work.

PudgyOne · Answer

4795209,

How did the computer get this way to begin with?

I'd try using system restore and take the computer back to before this happened, if possible.

This might help your CD issue.How to Fix Error Code 39 with DVD or CD-ROM drive in Windows XP/Vista

I'd consider uninstalling IE8 and see what happens. Yes, you'll get a prompt saying these programs were installed and might not work correctly, click ok and proceed. When the computer restarts, you'll have IE7 back.

Have you scanned for malware? Download Malwarebytes Anti-Malware update it and do a quick scan. Have it remove anything it finds.

Honestly, if all else fails, then I'd consider backing up all my files and folders that I could NOt afford to lose. This should ba a normal practice.

Then I'd...

Restoring Your Computer´s Software to the Factory Settings

Let me know what you decide and I'll try to help you through this.

Rick

4795209 · Answer

I have no idea how to back-up what's on the laptop before I try to revert it back to its out of the box state. How would I do that? Is that "system restore?" How do you do that?

I have some programs I paid for that I don't want to have to get rid of, like Artisteer, which I use to do websites for people, but also lots of documents and files. I have some flash drives, but don't know if there is any way to save programs like Artisteer.

It got this way from just downloading and trying different programs and then uninstalling them after they didn't work correctly or just weren't being used often enough.

With IE8. I asked a guy who works at a computer store in town and he told me not to try to uninstall IE8. He said the operating system needs IE to run and uninstalling IE8 would mess things up even more. He said he'd charge me $65 to look at the laptop and then the same for every hour he spends on it and couldn't say how long it'd take.

I know HTML and some javascript and wordpress and joomla, but the rest is still new to me, so sorry for not being as sharp on this stuff as some others might be. I'll e-mail Artisteer and ask if they can allow me to re-install the program if I revert this Dell to a previous state, while I wait to hear more.

Networking, Internet, & Bluetooth

Newbie Needs Help Please

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