Anyone Up For Some Compute Help?

[Judy Judy Judy]

I had a virus on my windows XP desktop computer and my Son-I-L thought he would help us out by cleaning up our computer, well he cleaned up the computer all right, we can no longer watch any kind of dvd on it at all, the interactual player, windows media player no longer works, nor does our powerdvd.

Whenever I try to watch anything on our interactual player it comes up that we need a dvd decoder. Well needless to say we don't want to have to buy anything else for this computer because we already have piped alot of money into it already.

Question, does anyone know of a free dvd player for the computer, it's basically the only place we like to watch dvd's, and we miss it already, we did download the VLC program but the picture comes up scrambled?

Thanks for any help anyone can give us, oh and by the way the virus is gone now.

 

[JR6ooo4]

sounds like he did a reformat and did not get all the drivers loaded.

Do you have the original CD/DVDs that came with the computer? Usually there are programs you can reload and also drivers that tell the computer how to run the programs.

what is the make and model of the comp?

Mikeeee

 

[JR6ooo4]

you should at least be able to download windows media player to watch DVDs.

Mikeeee

 

[JR6ooo4]

If your favorite "DVD player" is not working you probably have to add what is called Codecs. open the player and check the menus for an option to "update codecs" or something like that.

MIkeeeeeeeeeeeee

 

[Judy Judy Judy]

Well we have tryed to put in the cd to restore the drivers etc but it won't play in the computer for whatever reason

Our computer is an HP Pavillion 734N, so it's not a new brand, it's a few years old.

 

[JR6ooo4]

Well we have tryed to put in the cd to restore the drivers etc but it won't play in the computer for whatever reason

Our computer is an HP Pavillion 734N, so it's not a new brand, it's a few years old.

Hmmmm, that makes things harder.

did you check HP's site for drivers?
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareList?os=228&lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&lang=en&product=296682#

anything that says FIRMWARE is usually a more complicated installation and can easily cause problems.

try starting the computer with the system disk already in the drive, does that do anything?

Mikeeee

 

[Judy Judy Judy]

Any clue to what drivers I might be missing for our media player or interactual player, anyone possible know?

I did see the hp site with all the driver but I had no clue what could help me.

 

[manning]

Can you do a system restore? Assuming he did not reformat. You should have been able to get rid of the virus with a good anti-virus program. This is a good one and is not a memory hog.

http://www.kaspersky.com/

What exactly did your SIL do??

Do you have a reboot and backup disk? When you get the computer going again the very first thing you want to do is BACKUP YOUR COMPUTER !!! One good reason to do that is your hard drive will fail. Not if, but will. They all do, you just don't know when. They can last ten years or ten minutes. I had one fail on a new computer one month after I got it.

This is the program I use to do that "Acronis True Image"

The new version is "Acronis True Image Home 2009"

http://www.acronis.com/

You can download a free trial version.

 

[Judy Judy Judy]

I don't know exactly what my son-i-l did but I don't get why I can't get my applications and driver recovery dvd to run, anyone know what I can do? I have even restarted my computer with it in and have hit autoplay about 6 different trys, you can hear it running but nothing.

If he reformated my computer is it toast? I did a backup recovery disc but can't get that to run either? I'm so puzzled....

 

[manning]

Here is something you may want to try.

I live in the chicago area.

There is a radio talk show called "the steve and johnie show" that has a computer segment every wed night starting at 11:00 PM Central time. They take phone calls and E-mail from people like you who are having problems and try to help fix it. They know their stuff. One person is going for a doctorate in computers, another owns a business fixing computers. Here is his website if you want to contact him

http://www.savemybutt.com/

The show is on WGN 720. you can listen to them on the internet here is the link

http://www.wgn720.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6336&Itemid=160#


I bet they will have you up and running in no time.

 

[Purseval]

Question, does anyone know of a free dvd player for the computer, it's basically the only place we like to watch dvd's, and we miss it already, we did download the VLC program but the picture comes up scrambled?

VLC Player is fine you just need the proper codecs. The 2 most popular packs are K-Lite

http://www.free-codecs.com/download/K_lite_codec_pack.htm

and CCCP

http://www.cccp-project.net/

Both are free and which one you use depends on how and what you like to watch.

 

[Judy Judy Judy]

Thanks everyone for the help, I have been trying again today to get our applications and driver recovery dvd to run and still nothing.

I did redownload the VLC program and the K-lite and CCCP program and it starts playing great and then after about 3 minutes it freezes up the movie.

 

[JR6ooo4]

I have not been to one in a long time, but there are help sites where the tech person shows you how to enable remote assistance. then the tech person can actualy move your mouse around and just look for themselves at what might be the problem. You can sit and watch what they are doing the whole time.

some sites are free, but most are pay sites.

Mikeeee

 

[SetzKitten]

I've seen that error message several times with interactual player. I think I fixed it by changing the hardware acceleration of the video card. Right click on the desktop and choose properties, click on the settings page and click the advanced button,then click on the troubleshoot tab and either lower or raise the hardware acceleration slider. I forget which way it needs to go.