Dell 1520 w/ Windows Vista Home Premium: Start-Up Issues

A few days ago I was away from my computer for about 24 hours, though it was left on. When I came back to it and opened it up it wouldn't come back to my desktop. It was just a black screen. (BTW, this has never happened before). I pressed the power button to see if that would get it going. But still nothing. So, for the first time since I've had my laptop (I've had it since late August 2007), I had to manually turn off my computer by holding down the power button. I turn it back on, and it seemed quite a bit different. Took much longer to load up to the login screen. Once I logged in, the screen went completely white and was like that for about 1 minute or 2. Finally, it slowly started displaying the desktop by starting with the Taskbar at the bottom. Then then "Windows Installer" box popped up and installed the "Dell Support" program which I've had on my computer since day 1 and yet this has never happened. Then I noticed that there were updates that needed to be installed. I took a look and noticed that my laptop was trying to install updates while I was going for that 24 hour period. Once of which was the new SP1 for Vista. The other, which I still can't manage to install for whatever reason is the "Cumulative Update for Media Center for Windows Vista (KB947172)" It's current status reads: "Failed." Not sure if that has anything to do with it. Anyway, ever since then I have had slow start-ups and I will continually get the all white screen when logging in from starting up my computer or logging back in from when my computer is in sleep. AND I am constantly getting the "Windows Installer" installing the Dell Support thing. Every time. I do not get it... Any ideas? I'm pretty clueless as to what is going on here..

Thanks in advance!
-Nate

 

Time to clean install.

 

What would a clean install consist of exactly? Is this necessary..

 

Necessary? No. I'm sure you could spend the next few days figuring out what exactly is causing it and fixing it. Or spend 2-3 hours doing this:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=120228

 

Yeah. Understandable. Just not sure if I'm comfortable enough doing that/Having to deal with all that...

 

Well, anything else is going to be as hard or harder, and will take much longer. You can just hit the recovery partition or use recovery discs if you don't want a clean install.

 

Any other guides you know of that show how to use the recovering partition or discs?

 

Put the discs in and boot up or hit one of the F-keys at boot up if you have the recovery partition.

 

Ah. Okay. And that'll basically put me all the way back to where I was when I first received my laptop?

 

Yes, the recovery partition will do just that.

 

Have you tried a system restore back to a day before these problems began? I had some systems issues (lockups) this weekend on a new 1720 after some automatic updates and some manual Microsoft updates. I am not sure what the problem was but after a system restore everything seemed fine again. I then reinstalled the updates (one at a time so I would know the culprit if I had another issue) and everything seems fine now.

I'm a novice but this is relatively easy to try and harmless as far as I know.

 

What did you perform you system restore?

 

Sorry...

*bump*

 

-Stick in Vista reinstall disk
-restart
-at Dell screen, press F12 until you get to a "boot from" screen
-Select CD/DVD
-Click "repair this computer" once the disk is done loading

 

How long does that usually take?

 

1-2 minutes.

 

And that means I'll lose all the programs, etc. and revert it back to where it was when I first got it?

 

No, it means it will revert your computer back to the previous restore point. If system restore is on, then it will have created a restore point before the last update you installed or before the last major change you made (to your settings).

 

The above poster probably knows more than me so that's probably good advice.

I think I got to system restore by hitting F8 during the Dell startup. This gave me the option to restore to an earlier point.

I'm at work and don't have my laptop or documentation I used but I'm pretty sure that's what I did.