netbook hanging

[trixical]

My netbook (Samsung nc10 running xp) currently is struggling to bring up my desktop & basically hanging on the 'loading your personal settings' page after login
It started fine this morning & closed down normally, tonight nadda

Any suggestions?

[williredale]

Have you got any other accounts on the netbook you could try and login as?

What operating system have you got on it?

Does it boot in safe mode (press F8 on start up)?

[trixical]

williredale said:

Have you got any other accounts on the netbook you could try and login as?

What operating system have you got on it?

Does it boot in safe mode (press F8 on start up)?

Thanks for the quick reply
Just my usual account & administrator

Windows xp

yes I can now boot it in safe mode, it appears my usual profile is corrupt, I'm just trying to copy my files off it

Is it going to be best to find the recovery cd & do that or can I potentially fix it without having to start from scratch?

[williredale]

If it's your profile which is knackered you can login as administrator and create a new account.

Login as the new account to populate the c:\documents and settings\new account

You can then log back in as administrator and copy your documents to your new account (and make a backup to something external while you're at it).

You may be able to do a system restore back to before your profile was broken but I would create a new profile rather than go down this path.

[trixical]

I've managed to create a new profile & pulled off the docs last night to my external hard drive but all the documents on that profile (which I've now deleted) still appear to be there taking up space,
I can't get into the user folder which is still ther or seem to delete them I just get the message can not access/something in the folder may be being used etc etc

?

[williredale]

This may help:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308421

which walks you through taking ownership of the folder in documents and settings.

[trixical]

Thanks, had to do a full reset in the end anyway though as it was slower than a snail in dry cement

[dtmpower]

Seems like a good time to install Ubuntu on it.

I would never go back to Windows for my NC10 now.

[clonmult]

dtmpower said:

Seems like a good time to install Ubuntu on it.

I would never go back to Windows for my NC10 now.

Did similar on my old laptop (Celeron M, probably similar speed to some netbooks), the speed difference going to Ubuntu was quite amazing .... occasionally think that the 1.7gig Celeron with Ubuntu does things faster than my i7 rig running Windows 7.

[williredale]

trixical said:

Thanks, had to do a full reset in the end anyway though as it was slower than a snail in dry cement

TBH I wondered if it would come to that.