A little computer advice please!

So i just bought a gateway laptop about three months ago and everytime i start it up now I get a blue screen right away. The only way I can use it is in safe mode, which doesnt really help me much. I was looking into the recovery options, but I dont have any restore points or anything like that, but there is an option that would take everything back to factory condition, which I assume means it still has windows and everything on it. Im not worried about losing anything, I just use it for the internet basically. ( No music or documents, etc.) I guess my question is, if I do restore it to factory condition, Im I just destroying my computer or will it be like when I bought it from Best Buy and I can just start it up and get on internet explor?

As you might be able to tell, I dont know anything really about how computers work and any adive would be appreciated!

 

Putting it back to "factory condition" will restore everything and it will be just like the first time you turned it on when it is finished.

 

Correct - with a couple of caveats - if done from a restore partition on the hard drive everything should be fine but if done from CD a lot of restore disks don't include the drivers for all of the hardware - which is stupid but true. Problem is that often the network card driver is among the missing so you may need access to another computer to download the missing drives to a memory stick and install them on the newly wiped clean computer. Next is that you will need to reinstall any Windows Updates as they won't be on the restore partition or disk.

 

Can you get into safe mode with networking?

 

If you are heading in the direction of cleaning it up (removing malware, correcting other similar issues) as long as he doesn't have any data to save it will be much faster to use a restore partition and "nuke and pave" the hard drive.
I'm stubborn and always prefer cleaning the machine but sometimes it just isn't worth it and when there are no huge amounts of data or lots of programs installed then it just makes most sense to hit the restore feature.

 

A blue screen of death is typically a hardware issue. So if you have a failing piece of hardware then a system restore might not help if the hardware is still bad. Of course it could be bad/corrupt drivers. Are you able to see the error message on the blue screen? That could give us some hints on what the problem might be.

 

That is no longer as true as it once was.

 

microsoft has taken over ... your computer .......

 

The blue screen will show you an error codes/numbers on screen without that this thread is useless.

It could be hardware/virus/registry corruption/drivers/resource conflicts etc

Post the bit at the top arrow and then the numbers under the 2nd arrow. The 1st number combo after the STOP is the most important bit.
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