- Bought a new computer from Amazon last week. i5, 12gb Ram. The $450 Acer that was the bestseller last week. Was working fine. I had installed some of my old programs and getting it to my normal setup. Everything was fine for a week.
- Today, I needed to edit a PDF. I didn't have a PDF installed as yet, but I have a portable one that I use from work (as I have to shift from PC to PC I have some portable stuff to use) and I thought I'd use that in the meanwhile.
- When I double clicked, everything started flickering, taskbar and desktop and the icons on my desktop. I couldn't stop it. The app was not showing up in my task manager (it never opened), so I restarted the PC and it was normal ( a bit laggy), but not noticeable.
- Then I realised the issues:
- First noticed that the shortcuts I had pinned to the taskbar were gone, and it was back to the basic edge, email, search... icons
- I had to sign into chrome again, pinned tabs were gone, extensions had to be re-added.
- search function within folders, or from the pinned icon on the taskbar doesn't work when I hit enter. and it doesn't open from the start menu. Zero response.
- Windows button on my keyboard doesn't work, left clicking it from the taskbar does nothing.
- Right clicking on it opens the menu, but only event viewer, device manager, disk/computer management, task manager open.
- Everything else - search, network connections... don't respond.
- a popup says that it cannot find Powershell
I have bitdefender installed and windows defender, and my flash drive is clean.
100% sure it was because of the pdf but how do I fix it. The PC came with windows pre installed and I don't have a windows CD to do a reset and I didn't set up all that system restore point stuff because I haven't really had a chance and I didn't think I'd need it one week in, because I've never really needed it, because I always had the CD if things got too bad. I haven't set up a partition either and I already have about a 100 GB of stuff that I really need for work and school that would be hard to recover.