Client with Dell laptop had a hard disk with numerous bad sectors. (Refused to boot at all. I pulled th drive and ran chkdsk /r; it found and replaced more than a dozen bad sectors. He said the laptop was oddly slow from when he bought it new.) I cloned the "repaired" drive and his laptop now boots, but...he has some real problems. (On the positive side he said it boots a LOT faster with the new drive.) I told him we need to re-install the OS but he is very reluctant as he has a some oddball specialized apps and is far from home. (He is here in Fiji for almost a year.) At random times, the OS decides it is non-genuine. Usually, just going the system properties page causes Windows to decide it IS activated and be okay. A few boot later and it is no longer 'genuine.' When I tried to download and install the 'Genuine' ActiveX plug-in to re-activate, the stub downloads okay, but when it tries to run, it crashes with 80072EE7 (0). (The hosts file has NO entries so that is not what is happening.) The other immediate oddity is he cannot run Windows Update. It says "service is not running" but the WU service says it is running. I tried SFC /scannow and it reports that it found problems but cannot fix them.
Ordinarily I would simply insist on a clean install but the guy says his others apps run and he'd rather live with odd problems than lose his apps. Any suggestions as to what might help with at least getting Win Update to run and stabilizing activation?
Ordinarily I would simply insist on a clean install but the guy says his others apps run and he'd rather live with odd problems than lose his apps. Any suggestions as to what might help with at least getting Win Update to run and stabilizing activation?