About a year and a half ago (December 2012) my dad got me a Gateway NE56R34U laptop. It runs Windows 8.1 64 bit and worked fine until recently. About two months ago the hard drive began failing so I replaced it.
Then after working for a month things began to go wrong. One day the laptop began working extremely slowly. Upon restart it would not boot correctly. At first the screen went dark after the Gateway splash screen. Somehow I got past that (can't remember how), to the log in screen. But Windows wouldn't load when I tried to log in. Then the mousepad (and the keyboard, but that problem was unique to the log in screen) quit working.
Thankfully I have a Windows 8 64-bit cd around (long story). But I could not use system restore. An error message popped up saying something in the registry was corrupted. Reverting to a system image taken after installing the new hard drive (and stored on an external hard drive) would not work for a similar reason. Even booting into safe mode would not work.
Eventually I reinstalled Windows 8 again and now everything seems to be fine. The only lingering issue is the mousepad refuses to work. I had a USB mouse plugged in during install and in the past that caused the same issue. Usually installing the drivers fixed it, but that is not the case.
Do you think the above issues were software related? Was it malware? I had installed Avast Free Edition, but may have forgotten to add a firewall. Or does my laptop have a hardware issue with perhaps the motherboard?
Then after working for a month things began to go wrong. One day the laptop began working extremely slowly. Upon restart it would not boot correctly. At first the screen went dark after the Gateway splash screen. Somehow I got past that (can't remember how), to the log in screen. But Windows wouldn't load when I tried to log in. Then the mousepad (and the keyboard, but that problem was unique to the log in screen) quit working.
Thankfully I have a Windows 8 64-bit cd around (long story). But I could not use system restore. An error message popped up saying something in the registry was corrupted. Reverting to a system image taken after installing the new hard drive (and stored on an external hard drive) would not work for a similar reason. Even booting into safe mode would not work.
Eventually I reinstalled Windows 8 again and now everything seems to be fine. The only lingering issue is the mousepad refuses to work. I had a USB mouse plugged in during install and in the past that caused the same issue. Usually installing the drivers fixed it, but that is not the case.
Do you think the above issues were software related? Was it malware? I had installed Avast Free Edition, but may have forgotten to add a firewall. Or does my laptop have a hardware issue with perhaps the motherboard?