My Gateway laptop using Vista will randomly restart, then stall on the black screen that says "Operating System Not Found." Usually, with a hard reboot, it will eventually find the desktop, but this can take a very long time, up to 30 minutes.
Originally, everything was fine until the computer suddenly became very slow and balky while surfing the Web one day. After it became essentially non-functional, I reinstalled a clean version of Vista with the recovery CD, and everything seemed fine for a day or two before the slowness and random restarts started happening again.
Besides the Adobe 8 flash player, all I have dowloaded since the reinstall are Avira Free antivirus and RegDefense registry cleaner, neither of which seem able to scan completely or update themselves before the computer crashes.
If I can get to the desktop and start Internet Explorer, I can usually navigate quickly and easily as if nothing at all is wrong, but it may take a couple hours to get to that point.
What the heck is going on here? Should I replace the hard drive?
Originally, everything was fine until the computer suddenly became very slow and balky while surfing the Web one day. After it became essentially non-functional, I reinstalled a clean version of Vista with the recovery CD, and everything seemed fine for a day or two before the slowness and random restarts started happening again.
Besides the Adobe 8 flash player, all I have dowloaded since the reinstall are Avira Free antivirus and RegDefense registry cleaner, neither of which seem able to scan completely or update themselves before the computer crashes.
If I can get to the desktop and start Internet Explorer, I can usually navigate quickly and easily as if nothing at all is wrong, but it may take a couple hours to get to that point.
What the heck is going on here? Should I replace the hard drive?