Windows messed up

Animal · 2022-05-13T12:41:15+00:00

Got a laptop to sort out, not sure where to ask for windows advice. The relevant comp groups look dead.I'll ask here, some may know what to do.Modern but single core laptop, hw specs are more than enough.Win version? I've yet to find out. I haven't used win for many years. It's clearly post-xp.History unknown & we have none of the passwords. System idles at almost 100% cpu, 1.7G ram. Biggest hogs are Antivirus (don't recognise the logo), antimalware (no idea whose), "service host: local system (17)", and there's various other junk I'd remove. Problem is everything's locked down.I couldn't find any way within win to uninstall, disable or delete anything. I put the hdd in a linux machine to delete stuff, but even with admin privileges not a thing is deletable. Don't have a copy of win for a clean install.How do I move forward here?

#Paul 4 years ago

I've not been following this, so I may be at a tangent, ot repeating something already mentioned, but fwiw my debian install (xfce desktop) gives two choices if there are two displays connected.

Either to treat them independently (so different resolutions allowed, but some things will show on one but not the other, which can be problematic if one is broken); or mirrored, where they show the same things, but if one is lower res, it gets truncated (and I supposed if I make the lower-rs one the main one, the larger res will get blank edges).

#Paul

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Paul 4 years ago

Given that the "main monitor" seems to be the broken one, to me the issue is whether there's any way to issue commands or do anything to fix it.

I'd hoped my laptop would demonstrate that the F5 key worked in Linux, but it didn't work for me here. That was going to be my slick way to get out of this mess.

There are lots of situations on computers, where you just can't work the controls to gain traction.

On some of the VMs I've run here in the past, on VirtualPC, the emulated graphics were some SIS chipset graphics. Complete with a limitation that forced me to inject Xorg.conf files into the Linux setups. Just so I could see the screen. I would hate to have to resort to doing that, as with Wayland on the horizon or already in place, I have no idea whether an Xorg.conf can tell Wayland what to do.

(Part of an xorg.conf from VirtualPC and SIS days)

Section "Monitor" Identifier "Monitor0" VendorName "Unknown" ModelName "Unknown" # Hacked numbers, to prevent sync rates from limiting operating modes HorizSync 31.5 - 75.0 VertRefresh 50.0 - 100.0

# Modelines via "cvt". Modeline "1152x864_50.00" 66.25 1152 1208 1320 1488 864 867 871 892 -hsync +vsync Modeline "1024x768_60.00" 63.50 1024 1072 1176 1328 768 771 775 790 -hsync +vsync Option "DPMS" EndSection

Section "Device" Identifier "Device0" Driver "s3" VendorName "Vanilla Corporation" EndSection

Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen0" Device "Device0" Monitor "Monitor0" # Try values like 8, 16, or the default 24 bit DefaultDepth 16 <=== bit depth gives 64K colors, nonstandard SubSection "Display" Depth 16 Modes "1152x864_50.00" EndSubSection EndSection

Paul

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#Paul 4 years ago

What do you mean by "unintelligible"? Is it that it looks coherent, but you can't see enough of whatever it might be to work anything out? Is it like some weird scaled version of what you expect, but truncated? If so, does that look like it

*might* be the standard graphical background as on the other screen? Or is it a load of texty but incomprehensible system messages?

Alternatively, does it instead look like random coloured junk? A selection of blurry lines that might change as you move the mouse, or as you type?

Or something else? If so, what?

#Paul

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