Well, some of you may know that my laptop has been giving problems. Being a DELL (Inspiron 1300 - Pentium M 1.79 Ghz; 512 mb ram; 64mb video; 1280x800; Windows XP Home Edition), you would not have expected it nor wanted it. The first problem; a cursor on a black screen. Now; the second problem; occurs one week later; a message in white text saying "No bootable device found..." So; it giving problems; I send it off to PC World. For those of you living outside of the UK - and I don't know wether you have it in the USA and in other europian countries - PC World is a computer superstore, and my laptop's warranty covered it... my HDD wasn't actually registering! So; they take it there; and one week later; it works... no problems. Yay!

Well, not quite. One week later. Yes - one week later; it has another problem. This time it boots up; standard problem - it comes with a black screen with a mouse cursor. GRRRR :mad:... I'm sure everyone can understand my fustration. Anyway; on to the suspections. I suspected all of the following for my problem.

Windows Update
Vibration
Heat/Temperature (This sticked for a while, because everything pointed to it, because when it was cooled; it seemed to work)
Bad CMOS configuration
HDD Corruption
Driver Corruption
VirusesNone of the above; by the way were actually the problem. The problem was a nice little, actually, let me rephrase that, evil little; cunning byte-coded program named :( GIVEIO.SYS :(. This isn't actually related to Windows, it is installed by a program called SpeedFan. No, SpeedFan isn't a bad program, it's actually quite good, but in controlled situations, it can cause some pretty bad things. This program, or driver, allows basic communication between the BIOS and SpeedFan. It allows SpeedFan to get the CPU and HDD temperature, fan temperature, etc. Well after loads of debugging, I decided to remove some programs... most actually had no effect.

But I removed SpeedFan, and woohoo! It removed GIVEIO... and it works! My computer now works perfectly, and no problems at all have been diagnosed so far. So, now you know how I fixed my computer... and to be careful with some programs.

Thanks all for reading,
Tom

Took 12 minutes to write. :)

Yaaay, congrats! :winner: Hope it won't bug you anymore! :D

Thanks :)

Congratulations! :)

Well, now I know if I ever have that problem what to get rid of. I only have Speedfan on my desktop, because that was the self-built one. Letalone saving unneeded energy, I shut it down every night, simply because I fear it overheating or something crazy. Some confidence, huh? No, I know nothing will happen, but I know it sucks up voltage because of my specs. I record all of my cpu usage, temperatures, and voltages just for grins.

So yay for getting it fixed... I'm usually pretty good at troubleshooting, but when I read your problems I was like, ummm?

I took a network class, not a computer class... So any network troubleshooting, I'm the guy to go to lol.

I'm glad you figured it out Tom! :D It's so annoying when computers get messed up. The only thing really wrong with ours right now is that explorer.exe doesn't start automatically.