Dell Inspiron 1545 with Vista, boots but is immediately hung. Safe mode hangs also.

S

sbranden

Member
My nephew bought a Dell Inspiron 1545 with what I believe is a 32-bit Vista OS. His original problem was that his wireless connection stopped working. (Broadcom 1397 wireless driver which I upgraded to 5.60.188.1 (with R251496.exe)). Didn't solve the problem. But while working with this, I got notified of a Trojan virus. "Defender" something or another told me we had an infection, and categorized it as "Severe". Well, I eventually got to the point where the laptop boots - but is immediately hung, with no ability to move the mouse whatsoever. And now, I have further deteriorated to not being able to boot to see his desktop at all.

I've tried a lot of stuff. Can't boot in Safe mode, because same thing - no mouse control, it just hangs.
I tried restoring the latest working windows config (advanced mode), but that didn't work either.
I tried "Repair", but that prompted me with "Other User" or some such nonsense, where anything I enter gives me a "specified domain" error.
(He doesn't think he has any Admin user/password set up. Doubt he created any recovery cd's, or got any on purchase either.)
I was able to get it booted to a windows32 command prompt but couldn't do anything from there as it was locked up tight - again.

Is there some default Admin user name/password out there, that somebody knows about? To help me progress in the F8/"Repair" option?
Can I get a recovery CD/DVD of some sort - from somewhere on the Net, or from Dell maybe??

This is the second laptop that has gone belly up on this boy in a couple of years. First one was a system board failure, but he needs this for college in a couple weeks.
Thanks for any advice anyone can give me here.


Stephen
 
There is no default Admin User name and password. Only the one created for the machine when it was initially setup. The only option to get Recovery Media would be from Dell or Microsoft. Nut since this is a machine that was purchased from someone and not directly from Dell, you might not be able to get assistance from them.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/326246/en-us

That is going to be your best hope. Sorry to say but he shouldnt buy 2nd hand material. If he does he needs to make sure that the machine is reset to factory settings. Buying a machine used is like buying a used car. You never know how much life your going to get out of what little life it has left. The Inspiron 1545 is at least 5 years old now. My wife's Inspiron 1501 just crapped out just 2 weeks ago. So I would be very surprised if he got a full semester use out of it. Tell him to save his money and buy a new Laptop. At least then there is a year warranty on it, with the option to buy extended warranties.
 
Hey, thanks for the reply. As you can tell, this project had to take a back seat to some other things. But I'm not sure where from my original posting you would have thought he bought this computer used - this is the second laptop he has bought in probably 4 years, brand new both times, both failing just out of warranty. The first one had a motherboard problem... heat issue, where it would shut itself down about as fast as it would come all the way up. And this one again started out as an Internet connectivity / Broadcom card problem, but where there was definitely a trojan of some sort that eventually got complete control of the system before we could work out the first problem and get to some site to try and run a cleaner program.

So now, unable to connect to any sites - and not knowing the Admin password (BUT THIS WOULDN'T HAVE CHANGED FROM THE DEFAULT AS NEW, IF THERE IS A COMMON STARTING POINT FOR THE ALL-POWERFUL ADMIN USER ID???), I'm stuck and was looking for any special boot sequence or combination of keys I could hit to throw me into something else that would help me get this computer back on track. -OR- can somebody tell me who's package to buy and download, or which CD/DVD to get put in the mail pronto, to help us recover this system - shoot this virus on boot up, and just get on with it.

Thanks again for any/all replies. Will be watching this more closely this week as we begin to work this much more aggressively again now.


Stephen
 
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