I don't know if anyone will be able to help me or not. I certainly hope so, because I'm going crazy. I have a laptop that was given to me by my father's boss after my house fire last February. They didn't send me a reboot restore disc incase anything happened to it and I could restore it.

It's a Compaq Evo N610c laptop computer. It has Windows XP Professional on it. One day my CD ROM quit working. I would hear it spin but wouldn't do much else. Whether it was a brand new disc or old used one, it would not work. Well to make a long story short, me trying to be smarter than I am, tried to fix the problem myself and the whole thing doesn't work now! None of my programs run, I can't get to system restore, when I turn it on every program I have downloaded on it pops up like 5 or 6 different windows that say windows cannot open this file: winword.exe. All of them do that. What on earth did I do wrong and how can I fix it or is it a lost cause? I can't even access Help and Support center. I had AVG 7.5 downloaded on it, but it seems to have disappeared! Even when I open the control panel, nothing wants to run from there either. HELP!!!!!!

Thank you,
Valerie38

It doesn't sound hopeless - just a real hassle.

First start by booting into Safe Mode. Turn the PC completely off, remove the battery if you have to. Turn it on and about the time the splash screen for Windows comes on, press and hold the "F8" key. then choose "safe Mode" from the menu using your arrow keys.

From there you can get to your start up menu and you should remove everything from it.

That'll be a good start. After that, the details vary widely. But you should be able to do google searches on specific "how to's" to fix it step by step.

__________________
- It's not rocket science...unless of course you are working on rockets, then it is. -