Hello, I'm having some strange problems with my computer. I have a Toshiba Satellite A205-S5000 laptop running Windows Vista. I'll start from where I think it might have began: A few months ago I only had about 3 gigabytes of memory left on my laptop. Then I accidently dropped my laptop on the floor. Suddenly after dropping it I now had 17GB of memory(???), so I started downloading more stuff. The only real problem I had at the time was that after dropping it, when I would play videos my computer would occasionally freeze or stall and you can hear something that sounds like a wind up toy being wound up 2 or 3 times followed by an audible click. This isn't a random sound, it follows the same wind/click pattern every time. It doesn't sound like it's coming from my hard drive but on the other side where my CD/DVD tray is. When my computer starts to click like this, if I don't close Windows Media Player or whatever program I'm using my comp will sometimes bluescreen. I'd never gotten a BSOD before until after dropping my laptop. Flash forward to now. I don't know if this started with the drop, but I can't go into Safe Mode. When I try it just goes to a certain screen that never finishes loading. I also can't save any restore points. If I try to make a restore point it will disappear. Now the freeze up thing is happening more often and I seem to have some kind of malware on top of it. I'm getting a System Event error when I start my computer and it seems like I have a different problem every time I start my computer up. These are some of the issues it has: it takes a very long time to reboot and stays on a black screen for at least 5 minutes before the log-in screen finally appears my Audio Service will be turned off for no apparent reason when I try to use my microphone to Skype or record something my audio is low and buried under electronic-sounding background noise(this one I really need fixed) computer sometimes has delayed reactions and mini-freezes like a malware infection when browsing and typing my Windows theme has switched to a blocky, plain default Sometimes when I reboot I won't be able to browse the internet even though it says I'm connected, forcing me to restart from the last known good configuration I don't know what's wrong with my computer, but nothing is showing up in my Ad-Aware scans. And since I can't go into safe mode or revert to a restore point, I've been out of luck trying to fix it. I've attached View attachment hijackthis log1.txt my HijackThis log.
Also, I can't use Google Chrome. When I open a Chrome browser the pages die and my computer will run slow. I opened the Task Manager while a Chrome window was open and it kept fluctuating up to %100 computer usage, whatever that means.
Whoops. Yeah, I meant HDD space. I had 3 GBs of space left, then as I was trying to decide what to delete I accidentally knocked my computer over and without having deleted a single thing an extra 14GBs of space magically appeared on my disk. OK, this is probably a dumb question but how do you back up a hard disk? Because I have at least 40GBs of data that I'd need saved before I could do anything that could wipe my HD and I don't know of any CDs that can hold anything near that amount. Yes.
The easiest way to backup now-a-days, is to get an external USB hard drive and just copy your files off (or use imaging software). These can usually be bought for about $60-$80 for 1 or 2 TB. If you have other hard drives just laying around unused, another option would be to purchase an external enclosure and attach it to your drive. These usually cost in the $15-$30 range (at least in my area).
OK. Shortly after starting this thread I ran a System File Checker scan 4 times. It said it couldn't fix some of the problems but presumably it fixed some. Then I ran the msconfig program and disabled all programs on start-up and enabled all my services on start-up. This seemed to fix most of my problems. I can use my mic now, my themes returned and rebooting is closer to normal times. But I was blue screening left and right. So I deleted a bunch of files to clear up about 7GBs of space and so far since doing that I've been pretty much back to normal. I know I still have malware floating around in my system somewhere though because in-between blue screens I couldn't use Google because clicking on search results would redirect me to random URLs. Though this problem has disappeared for the moment. The one real problem I'm having right now is that my computer starts acting up sometimes when I go into sleep mode. According to my performance scan this is due to my "Intel Graphics Kernel Mode Driver"(igdkmd32.sys) interfering with the sleep mode. It suggests that I uninstall this Intel program if I'm not using it, but I have no idea if I use this program or not. Does anyone know what this driver or program does and if it's safe to delete it?
Once I have means to back-up my data I plan to. And since I know some of this is hardware since it was caused by my computer being physically dropped, I'm going to try to have it looked at hopefully by this weekend. I opened sections of my laptop up a couple of weeks ago and didn't see any visible damage to the hard drive or it's connection to the motherboard/whatever the HD connects to, but I couldn't open the back part of the computer where the clicking seems to come from because that's covered by one large piece that doesn't screw off. Anyway, thanks for the help guys.