I was installing the MA111 wireless usb adapter from Netgear and ran into serious problems. Here is what I did:
- First, I ran the CD and installed the driver. No problems there.
- Then, I plugged in the usb adapter and I got the "new hardware found" window asking me to choose the location of the driver. I chose the "recommended" rather than looking in a specific location.
- Then I got a window with a list of options, asking me to select the one that best fits the description. All of the options pointed to the cd (drive D) except for the first one which was highlighted and pointed to a location in the c:windows directory.
- I chose that one that was selected and immediately the computer shut down - black screen - then restart.
- Upon restarting, the screen stayed black for a while and you could see (really faded) the windows xp boot screen. Eventually, the boot screen came up normal and I got to the login screen. At this point, the computer shut itself off again, restarted and did the same thing as described.
- This happened a total of three times until eventually, as soon as the welcome/login screen appeared, I pressed Ctrl-Alt-Del and got a black screen with the "classic" little windows logon pop-up window. I logged on (no password needed here) and finally got to the desktop. I was somewhat relieved at that point.
The computer now can be restarted and it eventually makes it to the regular "home-user"-style logon window and you can click on the user name to continue. The only problem now is that it still takes a long time when starting up -
still this black screen with a really light faded windows xp boot screen for a while (as though it had started to fade in, but froze in the process) until the boot screen comes up and then it's all normal in terms of speed.
I ran a system restore and checked that the installed driver was no longer there (in the device manager). All seems to be gone / restored, but
the problem persists with the lengthy startup.
I was doing this for a friend and so I feel really bad that it's not my computer and now it's not quite like it was before. Any help in fixing this is GREATLY appreciated. Even though she can use her computer right now, I get the unsettled feeling that it is not too stable anymore. I can't imagine what I could have done wrong. I have done this several times before and never encountered this.