Resolved HP Mini netbook won't open Explorer and other problems

My husband bought me a little HP Mini netbook for my birthday 3 months ago. It's cute for taking on the road to get online in hotels and such. Two weeks ago I was staying in a hotel and I went online in my room. It was fine for the first day, but then I got some notification that I need to update something. It seem legit so I let it do it. I think it might have been to update to a new version of Internet Explorer, but sad to say, I'm not really sure.

Since then, I can't get the computer to open Explorer. At first I was getting a dark scrreen and a message telling me that some file was working or was missing or something.

Last night I decided to work on it and found System Restore, I think, where I could reset it to a good place in time before the problem started. It was either the evening of July 7 or 8 and I could see where it did some updates at those times. I'm looking at the Recovery screen right now and I see on July 5, it installed Windows 7 Service Pack 1. On the 7th and 8th it did a critical update, but I don't think it worked.

Also, since then, when I try to get the little thing online, it can't seem to find the wireless network here in our house. The laptop I'm on right now finds it just fine.

I hope this is enough info for someone to offer some guidance on how to fix my little travel friend. Thank you so much. I've entered as much info as I can find in my profile.

Thanks so much. Musicteacher

 

Have you told it to repair the connection?

 

When I select Troubleshoot Problem, it tells me that Troubleshooting couldn't identify the problem. When I click for detailed information, I get a message that says: msdt.exe - Ordinal Not Found, and then The ordinal 383 could not be located in the dynamic link library iertutil.dll

 

Try this.

Click the Start button, then click Computer. Then right click on your HD which should be "C ". Left click Properties. Then click on the Tools Tab. Then under Error-Checking, click Check Now. Make sure that Automatically fix file system errors has a check in in. Click Start and follow the prompts. It may or may not ask you for a password. Let it finish doing it's thing and it will boot back into windows when it is finished.

 

You certainly have a malware.

Please read this & Post in Malware and Virus Removal.

 

MrBill, your directions are wonderful. Thank you for giving them the way you do. I did what you said and a message pops up that says: Windows can't check the disk while it's in use. Do you want to check for hard disk errors the next time you start your computer? So I'm telling it yes.

 

I just restarted it, hoping it would check for hard disk errors like it said it would, but it did not. I followed your directions again and got the same messages.

I've discovered that this mini has something called HP QuickWeb that lets me go online without firing up Internet explorer. It is connecting to the wireless in my house and going online, but I can't seem to get IE to do it and connect.

 

I've corrected the problem with it connecting. That's fine now. But I still can't start up Explorer. I understand that perhaps I have some malware, but when I started to follow the directions for that and tried to download and run Malwarebytes, I can't seem to download to this little computer. Seems like I should be able to download to the hard drive, shouldn't I?

 

You could download it on some other computer & then install it on yours using USB or cd.

 

Try Safe Mode with Networking.

 

After I posted on the Malware forum, I got the help I needed and now little mini is running just fine. Thanks for the help.

 

Glad to know.