No GUI, windows xp

[josh.wright1591]

A family friend of mine has a windows xp computer still that is running some special programs for working a Braille printer and it was custom made a while back for that. Since it’s a voluntary thing at the moment there isn’t really any money available for upgrading to newer OS along with the fact that most of the programs still are only limited to XP and some run in compatibility for 95 still. Needless to say at the moment, upgrading isn’t possible. The issue that she is running into is that after she went on vacation a while back, when she got back she turned on the computer and the GUI didn’t appear and upon restarting now even the GUI doesn’t show up. I’ve only minimally looked into it and I went into msconfig to see if the no GUI boot option had been clicked by accident but it hasn’t been. I’ve also tried running explorer.exe through command prompt and just get an initialization error each time. Any ideas or direction into what to look for?

 

[190221]

if you legit have a just have a C:\ prompt covering the whole screen you're certainly not in windows. does safe mode work?
is there a floppy disk in the drive, if the PC has one?

 

[josh.wright1591]

She currently has access through task manager and she’s able to run some programs and access some programs through the start process function. But there’s some programs she uses that require internet and it currently uses a usb WiFi adapter but it appears that the drivers are not loaded either and there fore she isn’t able to use internet required programs. She says it will run some programs that she needs in its current state but they can only be accessed buy going through task manager. There’s just currently no GUI interface and That some drivers aren’t loading.

 

[190221]

oh okay. can she open system restore?
"%systemroot%\system32\restore\rstrui.exe" (no quotes) from the run prompt