Whats the issue?

MrWill

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Sep 5, 2014
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Hi, few days ago I turned off my laptop by holding power button. Daft I know.

It created a problem where the laptop would then get stuck in a restart boot cycle saying it had run into a problem.

I tried repair disk, playing with boot settings with my limited knowledge and got nowhere.

So I took it to a repair shop and they said they would have to wipe it and re install a new copy of windows 8 for £50. They did this but then gave it me back and I was getting a message in the action centre asking for windows to be activated. So I took it back and they seemingly sorted that.

But it now is generally slow at everything. It used to be really fast at starting up and opening programs. It now boots in LEGACY mode. It used to boot in UEFI. That is the only difference, with my limited knowledge I can see. For example it used to start up in less than 10 seconds and be good to go. Now it takes around 25+.

I just tried to change it back to UEFI and the screen is blank and just says, 'Searching for media(Failed)'

The laptop in a Dell Inspirion 15rse with Win8. I7, 8 ram blah.

Felling pretty angry at the min, but need to know it's justified before I go back to the shop.

Thanks for any help.

 
Did the shop install all the windows updates, and the motherboard/chipset/graphics drivers? That would be the first thing I would check because most shops will reinstall Windows for you, but leave everything else up to you. For the motherboard/chipset/graphics drivers you will need to grab them from the Dell website.
 

MrWill

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Hi, it seems they have done as far as I can see, they said they were going to do too. All except the card reader driver though which they seem to of missed.
 
It is possible that they fully updated Windows but left out the drivers from Dell. I would check into that, since they didn't install the card reader(which will also be on the dell site). Windows will install generic drivers for basic funtionality, but the proper drivers are usually much better and could make a difference in this case.
 

MrWill

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Thanks, I will try that.

Is the boot setting change and issue? And with it not seemingly possible to me to change it back to what it was originally. It has me suspicious/worried.
 

MrWill

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Sep 5, 2014
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Eventually have given up, been back to the shop 4 times now. The Windows they keep installing keeps asking for activation, as they don't seem to be able to view the activation code, but they say they have bought something which allows them to now(?). They've installed Windows once on the hdd and ignored the small ssd designed to be used for cache purposes and boot, as they don't seem to be able to figure it out how you set it up, which made the laptop painfully slow. And now most recently on the 32gb ssd, it's blazingly fast, but it isn't big enough for the Windows updates lol!

So I have bought a Samsung 250gb ssd and will be doing away with this silly setup ( 5400 hdd and tiny ssd) and hopefully they can manage to sort that out!

Should be simple now right?