Explorer failing and closing down repeatedly

cbachinger

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I am getting worried about my 5 year old HP Compaq nx7010.

From time to time, while in windows explorer, there is an error and the window has to close. Now it does so more often; even as i open it after a few seconds! Why and what could the problem be?

I have scan disked it twice in a week, which i have never done before but the problem persists.

I happen to be accessing my portable HD when this happens and i also scan disked it, with no change. It is not old (<2 years) but i bought it in china and hope it is not causing problems.
 
Any 5yr. old system still seeing the original Windows installation is long overdue for a drive wipe and brand new clean install of Windows in order to solve any number of problems within Windows itself. Plus you have to look at things like wear and tear on all hardwares including possible memory faults.

Is the portable drive connected through a usb port? You may see that corrected by simply plugging it into a different port. Or Windows usb controller problems are now being seen where again a fresh copy of Windows may be needed.
 
A drive wipe can be a simple reformat of the present primary partition in order to clean things up for a fresh install of Windows. Or you decide to restructure the partitioning for let's say seeing a second storage partition or dual boot with another OS.

At some point you may find it easier to simply delete the one primary and see two new created 1=OS host/boot 1=storage or two separate operating systems sharing one drive. Should you end up with a virus of some type corrupting files as it spreads into everything then you would consider everything on the drive lost to avoid any reinfection by wiping the drive in that sense.

In other case where you are donating an old system with all your personal information on the hard drive you would elect to use a security to actually fill the drive entirely with binary 0s in order to insure no one could recover anything like your credit card number or anything else personal from the drive itself.

With any system being 5yrs. old there's actually any number of problems that could start appearing out of nowhere while this points to software more then hardware problem being seen. Once a copy of Windows has been on for too long the system registry as well as file integrity of the main system files can pose a problem.

In the immediate you can try using the system file checker(sfc /scannow at the Run prompt with the Windows disk in the drive) to see if that needs to replace any damaged or now missing system files. Another thing to try out there would be looking over the startups you see in the msconfig utility to see if disabling one or two non essentials will see the problems cleared up.

The one thing most external drives see on further note is their own software in order to allow Windows to see onto the factory exFat type partition they generally come with. With Vista more so over XP the software is needed there until reformatting the external to NTFS native to Windows.
 
I have already sent my laptop in for a thorough series of scanning and testing at our local computer chain. Thanks for your advice!
 
Hopefully you will get a favorable report back once the shop looks it over.
 
Listen to Dodge, he knows what he is talking about. And one more thing-try formatting or reformattiong your drive. It may help, and if it doesn't, you still get the benefits :D
 
On a 5yr. old HP Compaq nx7010 I doubt very much you will find any Vista updates available which would be needed for the board, onboard(if used) video and sound, plus any addon devices available at the time. Yet someone managed to toss a fast 7 install on an old Pentuim II machine with only 64mb of memory to see if 7 would even run? It did for Windows with nothing else!

As for Linux you are now finally realizing support for much newer hardwares still posing nothing more then a basic install of any newer 32/64bit distro over the old 24bit releases.

(Personally I have both ubuntu 9.04 and Knoppix 5.3 installed on two usb flash drives for that option as well as live data recovery tools while leaving the main drives available for 7! :D )
 
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