Windows 10 UI broken

[Mercay]

Hey guys, got a bit of a strange issue with my dear mother's computer.

 

There is no taskbar, no start menu, no windows UI at all except the background image and the only thing that seems to work is ctr alt delete menu and task manager.

 

When I first opened it I noticed that it had near 100% disk usage thanks to superfetch, which i promptly closed and disk usage is now hovering around 5-10%.

 

I can't seem to find anything else in the task manager that seems out of place (although my knowledge on that is limited), and still no windows UI of any kind is working apart from the task manager.

 

Every few seconds the screen flickers and the loading icon appears at the cursor.

 

I'm thinking there is some sort of damage to the windows installation, or possibly some malware? Whatever it is I really don't know what else I can do, does anyone have any ideas?

 

Thank you in advance

 

**edit** When windows starts the desktop icons are visible and SOMETIMES even the taskbar, although after a few moments they all dissapear leaving only the background image.

[KenjiUmino]

is explorer.exe running ?

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

go to task manager, click on file and then new task, and type "explorer.exe"

[Mercay]

41 minutes ago, firelighter487 said:

go to task manager, click on file and then new task, and type "explorer.exe"

Did this, took a while for it to start up, but the explorer window is up now. Taskbar and the rest is still AWOL.

 

Trying to interact with anything in the explorer window takes ages coupled with some "not responding" messages.

 

The laptop is about 4 years old and has been used pretty sparingly, I would think that the hardware itself is fine.

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

18 minutes ago, Mercay said:

Did this, took a while for it to start up, but the explorer window is up now. Taskbar and the rest is still AWOL.

 

Trying to interact with anything in the explorer window takes ages coupled with some "not responding" messages.

 

The laptop is about 4 years old and has been used pretty sparingly, I would think that the hardware itself is fine.

does it have a harddrive or an ssd?

[Mercay]

3 minutes ago, firelighter487 said:

does it have a harddrive or an ssd?

Explorer does not want to cooperate at all, so I can't tell for sure. What I can see is that there are two drives and I would assume that the OS drive is an SSD given that the computer is not very old and cost a decent amount. It's pretty standard to have the OS on a smaller SSD and another mass storage HDD right?

Will see if I can open it up to check further.

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

1 hour ago, Mercay said:

Explorer does not want to cooperate at all, so I can't tell for sure. What I can see is that there are two drives and I would assume that the OS drive is an SSD given that the computer is not very old and cost a decent amount. It's pretty standard to have the OS on a smaller SSD and another mass storage HDD right?

Will see if I can open it up to check further.

you don't need to. i should have asked for a make and model. so can you provide that? then i can look up the specs.