Oh yeah, if you want to get into BIOS, hit F2, DEL, etc. The bootup screen will tell you but what button it is but you have to look quick as the screen usually stay up for only a sec and goes stright to Windows. If you get into BIOS setup the machine to boot from your CD, then you can reinstall Windows. Like others mention, back up everything before doing this.
Is not playing .wmv’s the only problem now? If there are still big problems, definitely have the computer boot off the windows disc as has been mentioned. Sometimes the key is F1 or F2 if you need to change the boot order in the BIOS. I’ve had problems trying to get videos to play imbedded in a browser, but not all wmv’s. Have you tried using a non-Windows Media Player program to open a .wmv?
[quote]analog_kid wrote:
Good lord man! Just re-install Windows already!![/quote]
Do the above and shut up.
put it in another comp & format if you can’t do it… then it has no choice but to install windows. if you can’t do it yourself, usually everyone knows at least one person good w/ computers.
i’d just say get another comp. my cousin found a dell w/ media center, 19" LCD, pentium D, 512/1g (don’t remember) for like 600$ w/ an online coupon. if you just websurf you can get a barebones for even less & use everything you have w/ it (monitor, keyboard, etc.)
it’s almost cheaper than just building it nowadays if you’re not doing any intensive work on them. (although i build my own anyway, i know what goes in them and they work how i want) and support is good
you need to boot from a windows disk, and reinstall.
You can’t format because you are trying to do it in windows. Fdisk won’t help either. you have to boot off a dos disk to be able to accomplish that.
If you can’t do this find someone who is good with computers and have them work on it for you. Your computer isn’t messed up your OS is.
All right, I’m going to try uninstalling media player and reinstalling, i’ll check out this website someone mentioned
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/Optimize2000.html
and then I’ll probably end up having to format and reinstall. I want to thank everyone for their help, I really do appreciate it, I tried asking some of my friends who know computers and all I got was “yeah, your computer sounds screwed up,” haha!
KBC,
I didn’t read the whole thread yet but it just occured to me that your original problem could be solved by uninstalling all of your microsoft updates. I don’t know if that will work though because some of them can not be uninstalled. If it works it will allow you to ‘upgrade’ by popping your XP disc in while the comp is running.
You can uninstall updates from the
http://update.microsoft.com/windowsupdate/v6/default.aspx?ln=en-us
page.
It is an option that you can dig around for somwehere on the left of the screen I think.
I dunno if the edit worked so here is that website again.
http://update.microsoft.com/windowsupdate/v6/default.aspx?ln=en-us
It must be accessed from IE only, not firefox.
Again if you can successfully uninstall the updates it will revert to the old version of windows and stop giving you that error message. Never tried it though, not sure if it will work.
You could try getting an illegal copy of Windows XP SP2. Or even a legal one, hehe. Try Limewire for the product codes etc…