5 replies to this topic

[michelle9491]

Hope I am in the correct forum for this. Laptop is a Dell Inspiron E1505 that I rebuilt. It has always worked even better than my husband's new laptop. I am pretty sure this is a virus/trojan, not a hardware issue, but could be wrong why I am on here. I was typing the other night & it all of a sudden started typing letters I was not typing & the lights on front of laptop started flashing. I stopped immediately booted into safe mode & ran superantispyware & went to bed. Next morning, it said nothing found. so then I ran malwarebytes, nothing found & avast scan, nothing found. Then the keyboard quit working all together, but touchpad still works. I hooked up a usb keyboard & it works fine. When I restart computer it gets stuck on the windows 7 boot menu & will go no further until I hit enter, never had to do that before. Also a few times firefox would only run in it's safe mode, now it's like normal but takes forever to open the first window. Went back into safe mode, ran microsoft security scan. Found 1 item, deleted that. Still doing the same thing. Did a system restore to another date, no luck. Just ran tdsskiller, nothing found.
I dont think it's the keyboard, because I installed a new one about 6 months ago & too many other strange things happening all at once. Someone please help! I am about to pull my hair out with this one!

[David H. Lipman]

Boot into the Dell Diagnostics and test your Inspiron.

[michelle9491]

 David H. Lipman, on 25 March 2012 - 08:51 AM, said:

Boot into the Dell Diagnostics and test your Inspiron.

Thank you for replying David!
Did that. results were 2 error codes, then I stopped the test due to having to work.
The codes were:
Error code 0123 memory integrity test failed
Error code 0142 drive test failed status byte=79 (hard drive dst short test failed)

So I am not sure if that means my hard drive is failing or what. The laptop works fine except for the keyboard. The only thing that still seems iffy is I have to tell it to boot into windows 7, which I never had to do before. I have ran so many scans in safe mode & they are finding nothing. It should be clean by now lol. I also saved all logs. I also took out the keyboard & installed a spare one just to be sure wasnt the actual keyboard. Tried downloading the dell bios, didnt change anything. But while doing that it would not let me install using the one file way, had to use the dell driver download manager otherwise it would say have to be the administrator to do this, well I am, I even double checked. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated as I need this for work. Oh when I tried to do one scan it said "system denied write access to hosts file" ???????????????

[David H. Lipman]

It means your Inspiron needs to be serviced ASAP - Sorry.

"Error code 0123 memory integrity test failed"
Means the RAM in your notebook is bad and can lead to all sorts of weird problems. It is possible that bad RAM could subsequently lead to OS corruption because data written from memory may not be accurate and equal to what should have been written

"Error code 0142 drive test failed status byte=79 (hard drive dst short test failed)"
You have a failing hard disk. A replacement is warranted.


If your notebook is booting and you are able to use your OS then that is good. That means you have time to get a new hard disk and port data from the failing hard disk. Continued use can lead to data loss. I strongly urge you to seek servicing and to stop using the notebook.

Installing a BIOS update while you have a condition of: memory integrity test failure is the WRONG thing to do.

[michelle9491]

Thank you David. I know I shouldnt have done the bios, but I really didnt think it was a hardware issue. My mistake. I have not turned the laptop on since. Hopefully it will be fine long enough for me to back up my files, will be doing that when I get home tonite. Then go from there. If it crashes after that, then so be it. I am just hoping I can limp it along for as long as possible. Really cant afford a new laptop for a month or so. But I could install a new hard drive myself, just not sure I want to put any more money in this old thing, but I am attached to it for some reason.

[David H. Lipman]

Capice!