Urgent Help Needed

[Scubacollie]

Having to type from a smartphone.

Hi all, I'm appealing to anyone that can help me out on a serious issue I have with my pc.

I've tolf my daughter's NOT to play a game named Fresh on my main pc, due to a few issues I had a few months ago which I pit down to this site, however kids will be kids and they have and now my pc is completely knackered.

My MAIN CONCERN is that I have hundreds of family photos that are VERY precious to me and the thought I could lose them annoys me greatly.

I know how to reformat a pc and have done this countless times in the past, but I've never had a problem whereby I can't access my files to backup.

Here is the problem:

Pc boots up to login screen, will either freeze whilst inputting password or will not allow to click the username to login.

I've tried accessing safemode and the screen goes black and nothing happens after about 30 seconds of login in.

I've tried f8 and reinstalling a previous configuration, but that still freezes.

I have a dell xps 420 and have removed all connections apart from.keyboard and mouse, have tried another mouse but still same problem, but don't have another keyboard to try.

I have the black dell disk that states windows vista reinstallation cd but don't want to lose my family pictures.

I've just looked up at the login screen and ALL of the login account names have now vanished! What's going on?

Please can somebody help me this evening?

[Scubacollie]

HI guys, thank you for all of your suggestions, much appreciard, I shall try the tootkill suggestion tonight and let you all know if I can run it.

Yeah, it crashed earlier a few times whilst in the diagnostic test menu when checking the memory and also another time whilst it was checking the CPU's, dies this therefore point to hardware problems and not malware?

Will check all the fans as suggested, however I don't 'think' the power supply fan was on, should this always be on? The only one that can be heard is the Graphics card?

Of any hardware gurus are able to offer any further suggestions I would be eternally grateful as I can try it tonight when I get in from work.

P.S. would a fan not working on the power supply disable the left mouse button at the logon screen, make the logon account names dissapear?

[Scubacollie]

Right, i've run the rootkill application and it hasnt found any threats!

I've also got it logged into SafeMode with the conservatory door wide open (its coolish today in the UK around 11degrees) and it hasn't yet crashed and has been running for around 10 minutes without any problems, although i haven't logged in normally yet (without Safemode) to see if i can log in or whether its still frozen.

I'm wondering if its the Power Supply fan? It always used to make a racket, was really spinning hard for years (as its stored in the Conservatory and it gets boiling in the Summer months) but now its not spinning at all, the only noise from the machine is the NVidea graphics card fan which sits ontop of the board.

Do you think it could be the Power Supply fan causing these problems? If it is the power supply fan and its cool and i try it with the door open then it shouldn't freeze on the login screen should it? Wouldn't it work normally if its running cool and this would prove its the fan or not if it works fine when cool? i shall try it in a minute, just transferring some other stuff over from the hard drive to the external.

Also forgot to mention, the other night i was able to get my photos accross to the external, as was getting in for about 8 minutes at a time before it went/crashed, however as the time went on the time decreased and was then occuring regularly at around 30 second time periods following boot and then got so bad it was crashing even in the boot menus when trying to run diagnostic checks.

Could this definetely point to it being the fan on the power supply causing these problems?

[Scubacollie]

Update:

I sorted it in the end, i realised the Power Supply fan is in fact working because i could feel it gently blowing out, but it isn?t noisy like my old 10 year old PC so sounds like its not spinning.

I cleaned the inside out with compressed air, it was in a terrible state, all the vents on the rear and front were covered in a carpet of fluff. I thought this might be what was causing it to crash.

However, following the clean, i booted it up, and it still crashed, the picture went off, and the graphics card fan span like mad again.

I then removed the graphics card, found a load of fluff between the graphics card fan and the actual card, i therefore blew this through as well, put it all back together, but it still crashed....

I then realised that when i removed the card, it was boiling hot and i mean hot!

So, when it still crashed again, i felt it, and it almost burned my fingers it was so hot.

I then checked Speccy, but it didn?t have a temperature for the card, only the CPU....

So i went on to the NVIDIA website, used the automatic identification tool (even though i already knew it was the 8600GTS and it confirmed that, and identified the driver that had only been updated this month, i downloaded that, restarted the computer, and as soon as it restarted the fan ran quicker that it did prior to the update on boot up, and this time Speccy was actually showing the temperature for it, and something else struck my eye, i couldn?t remember Speccy showing the graphics card before as a GTS 8600GTS, so checked Speccy report that i printed, and it actually had the Graphics Card listed as 14MB Standard VGA Graphics Adaptor (Nvidia), but was now showing as a 8600GTS!!

So far knock on wood its been about 3-4 days on constant and no crashed J

How could the Graphics Card driver have changed, could it have been a virus that caused this?

[Hum]

^ Maybe the old driver became corrupted and Windows tried to rollback ?

Maybe your kids clicked on some automatic Update, and something wrong was installed ?