An acquaintance asked me to check what’s wrong with her laptop. When I opened it, at first Vista seems to start just fine … until it reached the part that the task bar, program menu and the rest of the desktop items should have appeared. It did not!
I tried to open the task manager by doing the three finger salute (pressing ctrl-alt-delete)… Viola! Task manager was disabled! A mal-ware infection!
Usually I could open the Windows explorer from the task manager by opening up a local drive from there, but now the task manager is disabled! Naturally I wouldn’t risk inserting my flash drive with all my utilities in it to a computer with yet unknown level of threat. Question is what should I do next? Format the hard drive? Hmm.. My Bart’s P.E. is not with me. At least I should be able to make a backup before I format the whole drive…
First I need to find a way to open System Restore! However the Desktop is blank, Task bar and start menu is disabled! Task Manager is disabled! At that moment I can’t think of any other way of opening the Windows Explorer! I thought I really need to format the thing… or I just need a little help.
