At my wits end with this bloody machine!

[Ambitiousmould]

so i have a little notebook laptop. it sucks, buti still want it to work so i can take it to college and whatever, problem is, it's broked.
every website is in a wierd way where everything is in just plain blue or black text and videos won't play and most websites say i need to download flash player, but when i go to do this nothing happens, it doesn't even download.
some forums and such have told me to uninstall it, then try, but it says the uninstaller is broken.
also, when i try and play videos on the web it tells me i need to do something about something else with veoh video player (whatever that is). it has a really serious lack of memory left and i (like 2mb out of 13GB or something)and i can't find what's taking up the space, so i am currently performing a lengthy disk clean up, don't know what good it will do, but it's being going for like an hour and it's 4 bars in, so it's taking a very long time.
it's quite old, windows xp, and i don't know what version of internet explorer it's on.
i know it's not much of a descripition but any help at all will be appreciated.
please help before i take a hammer and smash it to buggery.

cheers.

 

[Aitur]

I think the main thing to sort out is the space, I'm amazed windows even loads with that, without sufficient space windows will start to act really strange... okay, stranger than usual and so that's saying something!
I also think the flash download program is a meg and then it downloads 20 odd meg for the program itself, so it's not a surprise it doesn't work.

You may have already done this so apologise if I'm not telling you anything new, but I'll say it just in case -
If you go to Start > Search then look for *.* with a size over 500MB (it probably wants KB so 500000), if it doesn't find anything of interest start reduce the search size.
Hopefully it'll show up some convenient mpegs or something that'll free up lots of space easily, but things to look for are any video files (mpegs, MP4, MKV, AVI etc), MP3's, photos, I'd say games too but as it's a notebook I doubt you'll have Crysis 2 installed

Failing finding any big, tasty files you could have a virus that's eating your space, there's plenty of free virus killers if you haven't got one installed - Avast [http://www.avast.com/index] / AVG [http://free.avg.com/gb-en/homepage].
However you'll need to clean the notebook before you can install any so, assuming you've got access to another machine, you can install a virus killer to a USB stick and then run it from there.

Another option is to get a Linux boot CD/USB stick and then check out the contents of your hard drive, this'll let you delete any huge files and you should be able to run a virus killer from there too.
Alternatively you could pull the HD out and slave it in another machine, although beware explosions should there really be a virus so that is a risky option.

Now assuming you've got some space, try uninstalling internet explorer and flash, then reinstalling both.

Personally I'd just wipe the whole drive and start from fresh, but that's only if you've got some way of reinstalling windows (full drive backups FTW!)

That's all I can think of at the moment, hopefully there's something there to help you along.

 

[Ambitiousmould]

i think you were right about the space, few hours later the disk cleanup finished and it seems to be working for now for the first time in years (even though i already did a few disk cleanups which is wierd but meh), fingers crossed, i will also probably just completely remove everything from it and start fresh liek you say too, just to be sure.
i think what may have taken up the space was my brothers guild wars installed on it, but hay ho.

cheers.