Amado wrote:
>My niece has an Acer 4021 laptop that's driving her, and me, crazy. She'd
> > noticed it had become real unstable, freezing up a lot,...>>


As well as Thomas' suggestions about heating, these symptoms also point to 
bad RAM. Try removing and reseating the RAM, or test with another stick if 
available.

Assuming you've then ruled out these factors, and checked for viruses, you 
might try the following. I've never tried it, so no idea whether it would 
work. Logically it should. (Which probably means it won't!). Perhaps 
someone has tried it, and can report on the exact method.

1. Copy the faulty disk2 to your hard drive.
2. Replace the "missing" dll file into exactly the same location as the 
original--you might have to do some educated guesswork if the file is 
completely missing--hopefully it may just be corrupted. If in doubt, 
there's no harm in copying it to more than one location.
3. Burn the copy to a new CD. This should eliminate the possibility of 
damage to the old disk. You MIGHT have to burn it as a self-bootable disk.

Not sure whether you might have to give it a label---eg Disk2--- so that 
"Disk 1" can find it.

Otherwise see if you can get an OEM copy of XP from Acer, or ask them 
nicely for a set of replacement recovery disks.  Tell them you'll be 
reporting back to the biggest international forum on the internet (we may 
be for all I know) so this will be a unique opportunity for them to 
demonstrate to the world how good---or bad---their customer relations are. 
Go as high up the chain as you need to.

Don Penlington




 From the Beach at Surfers Paradise in sunny Queensland.
Computer tutorials, local scenery,  and other things at my website:
http://users.tpg.com.au/deepend/index1.html

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