Admittedly, I'm a computer idiot and I wasn't quite sure which section to even post this question because I'm not sure what the problem is...
After not turning my system on for two weeks while I was on vacation, I come back to have several issues. First, the soundcard is not working. I get messages saying that my soundcard is in use when no other programs are running. I've run spywear programs to (spybot, adaware, registry cleaner) see if anything was running in the background, but no love. Then my system froze a couple of times and I had to restart. I tried a system restore to the point before when I left since it was working fine, but it was unsuccessful. When it was supposed to restart, it would not despite me leaving for an hour, the harddrive indicator light was still on and I had to manually turn the system off. Then I noticed on startup that there is a new BEEP that was never there before, and the usual startup screen (POST? i think - the one that shows things loading and hardware that is detected) isn't there anymore before the Windows logo appears. I tried defragmenting the harddrive and doing a scandisk since I didn't really know what else to do and the owner's manual said to give it a shot. Oh, and I checked the log today in safe mode and there is an entry about multiple drivers failing to load (probably why there's no sound?). Anyway, if anyone can make sense of this, please help. Sorry for making it so long, I just wasn't really sure what might be relevent or important. Thanks for taking the time to help!
