Laptop Startup Troubles and perhaps a New Notebook

[Magister Lajciak]

My laptop has a strange problem. I can use it normally, but when I shut it down, it refuses to start up. The booting process begins normally, but at a certain point a warning window from lsass.exe appears to tell me "Insufficient resources to complete API" and the computer immediately shuts down. If I try it again, the same thing happens and booting up in Safe Mode does not help either. I cannot reinstall Windows XP nor can I boot from the original XP CD for the simple reason that I no longer have the CD (or rather, I might have it, but in another country somewhere on the attic of my family members - they certainly have no hope of finding it there).

 

Somewhere on the web, while scouring for a solution to the problem, I discovered that something like this can caused by low hard disk space. So, I took out my laptop's hard disc and copied some stuff to another hard disc (using another computer). When I put it back in, the computer did manage to start up normally. After some more usage and a few more boot cycles, the same problem appeared and I solved it the same way and the process repeated itself several times, but the problem is that each time I seem to require more and more free hard disc space. The first time I needed to have only a 1 gig free on each partition (the HDD is 100GB and divided into two partitions of 50GB each) to solve the problem, whereas the latest time the problem recurred (today), I had 10.5GB free on one partition and 6GB free on the other partition. Something is clearly amiss.

 

I have heard that the Sasser worm mimics Lsass.exe by using a file Isass.exe, but I can never tell from the warning message whether it is genuine lsass.exe or the Sasser lsass.exe, as leter "l" and "l" look the same when "i" is capitalized and "L" is in lower case. Just to make sure, I did run the "Trend Micro" free check over the internet (my Norton subscription is long expired) and it did not find the Sasser worm, though I do feel that something went wrong with the scan as there were a number of unidentified problems in the report after it finished. In any case, though, the symptoms are somewhat different with the Sasser supposedly restarting your computer when you are already booted up and doing something and giving you a countdown, whereas my problem is that the computer refuses to start up and shuts down immediately after the warning screen with no countdown.

 

I am at a loss regarding how to solve this problem once and for all. If anybody has any ideas that work without requiring me to purchase/pay for something (some kind of clean-up program, a new XP DVD, etc.) I would welcome to hear that. Barring that, I will probably get a new notebook computer, which is something I have been thinking about anyway, since the current one is almost three years old, but I might hold out a little longer if this problem can be solved.

[Magister Lajciak]

Here are the basic specifications of my current laptop computer:

 

Pentium M 760 (2GHz)

2GB DDR2

ATI MOBILITY RADEON X700 with 128MB VRAM

100 GB HDD split into two partitions of 50GB each

15.4" WXGA

CD/DVD Writer/Player

[Magister Lajciak]

My next laptop/notebook computer should be able to serve as a multipurpose machine not only for my work, but also for multimedia (thus my desire for Bluray and Full HD monitor) and gaming. As to gaming, I would want to be able to run all current CRPGs and any CRPGs that are going to be coming out during the next 3 years. All current CRPGs should run well on the system, whereas CRPGs of the future, particularly those close to the 3 year limit I have set, should merely run - as in actually load and work.

 

Do you think the Dell system below for $2050 (including taxes, shipping and handling) that I am thinking of can accomplish all of the goals I have outlined above? Regardless of the answer to that question, do you think the system is good value for money? Thanks!

 

Here are the system specs:

 

SYSTEM COLOR Jet Black edit

PROCESSOR Intel

[LostStraw]

If you do have Sasser then this tool should remove it:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...;displaylang=en

 

There are other free anti-virus solutions out there such as AVG and Avast. (No idea how good the programs are)

 

Check the HD for errors and bad sectors. (Not a likely possibility but I'm grasping at straws)

 

If you haven't updated to SP3 yet it may help to do so. (Then again it could also cause more problems )

[Magister Lajciak]

If you do have Sasser then this tool should remove it:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...;displaylang=en

 

There are other free anti-virus solutions out there such as AVG and Avast. (No idea how good the programs are)

 

Check the HD for errors and bad sectors. (Not a likely possibility but I'm grasping at straws)

 

If you haven't updated to SP3 yet it may help to do so. (Then again it could also cause more problems )

 

Thanks LostStraw - I have downloaded the tool you suggested and it did not find Sasser. It did find some malware and needed a restart to remove it - the notebook, however, failed to restart and did the same thing I described above. So I took out the hard drive, pluged it to somebody else's computer and cleared yet more space from the hard drive in order to make it start up again, which worked eventually. At that point, I installed Avast, but in order for the install to complete, it wants me to do a restart, which I am afraid to do, because I fear it will not start up again. So the notebook has been running for a few days now without the restart demanded by Avast.

 

In any case, thanks for the suggestions!