Vista - Help! USB and NVIDIA driver issues

About three months ago, the mouse to my laptop stopped working. Shortly thereafter my iPod stopped being detected in my itunes and, thus, stopped syncing. iMy computer makes the noise that it has detected a USB device when i plug my ipod into the computer, but my iPod doesnt show up in the iTunes menu. I assume there are problems with the USB in that regard.
Also I bought Lord of the Rings Online and installed it with no problems, but when I went to play it, it wouldn't load up and was giving me error messages. Now when I click play, it doesn't do anything.. nothing loads at all.
So when I go to control panel >> hardware there are those "exclamation point in the yellow triangle" symbols next to the NVIDIA GeForce Go 6150, and also next to the Standard OpenHCD USB Host Controller.
I took it to Geek Squad (who held it for nearly a month and a half trying to fix it, only to find out that it was a software issue after replacing the motherboard... this software issue was determined to not be covered by my warranty -_-) and they suggested that it was a corrupt OS and that i should uninstall my OS and reinstall and reformat OS (they were also going to charge me 130$ for this service).
I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions on what to do. I have a HP Pavilion dv6000. Thanks a lot.

Hi Kronboss,

First, I think what Geek Squad did was absolutely ridiculous, they could have at least told you upfront about what was and wasn’t under warranty.

Now, the first thing I would do is backup all my critical files and folders. Once that's done, then I'd look to have the OS reinstalled. The reason I say reinstall the OS is besides the issue you had/have, you also don't know what Geek Squad did, so it's best to start over new.

Most retail computers come with a restore disk. If you have it, you should be able to restore the system back to factory specs.

If you don't know how to do this, then I would suggest you find someone who is reputable and knowledgeable and have them do it for you. Maybe you could contact the manufacturer of the laptop directly and see if in fact they could do it for free?

I think $130 is too much just to reinstall an OS, but to be honest I’ve never had to pay for PC repairs since I build my own.

Good luck

I recently bought a Lenovo IBM Thinkpad T42 for the office and it came with Acronis Recovery already installed on it and I think more and more laptops come like this now.

When you reboot the laptop, it goes to the normal booting routine and just before it will go into the login option, some wording appears telling you to hit F11 to do a system recovery... check and see if yours does the same if it didn't come with a recovery cd.

Good Luck