Hi Nicholas, that's great, I'm glad that worked!
That probably means that your system registry got partially messed up though, which is not a good sign for your machine, it could mean that possibly some pieces of your machine are not healthy.
Once you have your machine in a good state, it may be a good idea to make an image backup of the hard drive, so that you can completely restore it back to its current state later on. I use some software called Acronis True Image for doing this over here.
Restoring an image is way easier than actually doing a completely new install of Windows, since it maintains all your installed applications. Also it's an good way to upgrade your hard drive to a new one and then put all the exact same stuff back on the new one.
It may be a good time now to do a disk check - right click on your drive under "My computer", and go to Properties > Tools tab > "Check Now" button, and check the button to do a bad sector scan. Then when you reboot your disk will be examined for any bad sectors and those will be marked to not be used. That may help avoid some problems but note that it will probably take several hours for the scan to run.
Another thing that I've seen cause registry corruption in the past is RAM that is starting to get flaky. Since the registry is loaded in memory all the time and then saved back out when you shut down Windows, it can get messed up by bad RAM. You may want to get a memory test utility like this one: http://www.memtest.org/ and let it crunch away for a few hours testing your RAM to make sure there are no problems there.
Anyway, if your hard drive is old you may want to think about replacing it with a new one sooner rather than later with a symptom like this having happened.
- Michael |
