My friend's computer is hosed.

She has Windows ME and she wants to restore the system date. Currently her screen is just a blank white slate with a generic blue bar at the top.

What to do?

I asked her why she didn't just use her "go back" or "restore" feature and she said that's the problem. When she tries to use the restore feature, that's where the blank white screen comes in.


Anyone have any ideas?

Personally, I think she's just picking up virsues everywhere. I don't think the other people in the household use descretion when internet surfing.

try reloading windows from the cd, shut down and then start up with cd or whatever in place so the computer starts reloading the program from it-- it also helps to keep a .45 next to the computer where it can see it

Thanks for the advice, Looky. I'll pass it on.

System restore give people a false sense of security.

If she has a ME boot disk (floppy)

Follow this to try to restore from DOS:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...kb;EN-US;279736

If you need a boot disk I can send you a self extracting file to create one.


ETA: If it is indeed a virus most likely it will have inserted itself into the restore points. Most viruses are smart enough to do that now.

Thanks. I've passed on the info.

A bit more complicated but here is what I would do.
Boot to a LINUX bootable CD and run an AV scan. Another option to to boot with an AV recovery disk.

I can do either of these if they are interested.

Yeah, right on CPD I'm with ya even though I have yet to pick a new flavor of Linux to try!!!!!!

Give them all a try. VMWare server is free!

Never heard of it. Knoppix was the last version I tried.

VMWare is a virtualization software package that allows you to run virtual machines. Each VM can run any number of OSs. So your host machice could be running XP. Then you launch a VM that could run SUSE or Ubuntu or any other OS from within XP. It creates a secure "sandbox" to test/try other OSs. A great tool.