I don't know what going on! Help!

[cynthiar]

Forgive me, but I am not to computer savy! Sometime my computer will restart by itself and try to install updates. Somewhere along the line I guess its messes up and then a I receive a message that windows will try to repair itself. It will then say that it will return to a time before a I made a change to fix itself (well it says something along those lines), but I will still need the updated and the next time I turn on the computer I will have the same problem. Well, finally today I figured out where to find the updates and it seems like I need 16 total: Office 2003(1), Window Vista (13), and Office 2007 (1) = noticed that it says (sp1). I see others have had problems with SP1. Can this also be my problem?

What do I do? Its annoying because I know I have to go throught the process of "fixing the problem" everytime I turn on my computer. Once I fix the problem the computer works fine, but it is still annoying.

I also receive an error from System Restore that said:

System Restore does not apper to be functioning correctly on this system.
The Volume Shadow Copy service used by System Restore is not working. For more information view the event log. (0x81000202).

What does this mean?
I know everytime the computer tries to update itself it restarts with the system restore, tell me there is a problem and it will attemp to fix itself. Is there any connection between the two?

 

[johngalt]

Hi, cynthiar, and welcome to the forums.

I saw your other post as well, but I'll try to concentrate on this one only - try not to post in multiple areas about the same problem, as it can get confusing.

If your computer keeps restarting itself and attempting to perform a System Restore, then yes, I'd be concerned.

First off, though, have you tried to perform any tweaking on the machine, such as disabling services for machine performance?

Now, I am assuming this is a brand new machine that you recently bought, correct? If I were you I would contact SONY *immediately* and get technical support on how to restore your laptop back to its original state, and then as soon as that is done run Windows Update so it can update the machine with the latest patches, service packs ,etc.

This will be tremendously easier than trying to troubleshoot it at this point, IMO.

 

[cynthiar]

Re: System restore error?

Well I removed a couple of programs, like photoshop CS3 and games that I don't play, but it has been doing this since before that. It always does this when window updates are being performed. First the computer will shut down and then install updates... it restarts and gives me the system restore prompt. I looked in my history and there are updated that were not sucessful. Does that mean anything.

 

[johngalt]

Yes, it means that those updates will need to be re-applied. However, those should not be causing you to automatically go into System Restore.

It is possible that you have a virus / other sort of Malware - it is also possible that your system is simply being goofy. At this moment we cannot know for sure, so let's get back to basics - how new is the computer, and do you have a way of saving all those data files (pics, etc) to some other location so we can really start trying to fix this?

 

[cynthiar]

I the system is about 6-7 months old, and it is a dell laptop. I guess I can find a way to save it to somewhere else. Some one also told me to note that these problems seem to have started when I tried to install Adobe Photoshop, since the beginng it never really worked completely, but since what I needed it for class did work I never woried to much. I only unistalled it recently because nothing was working on it now. I think updates for it were unsuccessful. I also really first noticed this problem when I tried downloading "flash player 9" everytime I would resart I would have to restore, but that seems to be working find now. Now it just seems to happen when window is updating. Again, I sorry...but I am really stupid about computers and I don't think I would know how to restore my computer.

 

[johngalt]

Well, that may be the case, but more than likely if you are seeing that many updates for Vista, including SP1, then your problems started way before that - because when you set up the machine, it should have asked you to set up Automatic Updates to run automatically - obviously it has not been doing that.

I'd *truly* consider saving all your data files to an external drive and then restoring your laptop to defaults as it was when you first bought it - and then run Windows Update until there are no more updates.