Bit OT - WinXP PC locks up!

[Invisible Man]

Take care with CCleaner

[Adrian Brentnall]

4gigs - reported on 'my computer' as 3.25..

Adrian

[Adrian Brentnall]

Thanks. It did seem rather keen to erase quite a lot of things like cookies..... don;t mind it having the temporary internet files, but I'd rather not have to re-remember passwords and browsing history etc.

In the end I let it look at the registry, and it found some loose ends....

We'll see if it makes any difference

Thanks Adrian

[george [dicegeorge]]

I've just reinstalled winxp. i bought a new 300GB hard disk, inserted that, and put the old one in a USB caddy for a backup, only installed the programs I need, (every program i'd installed slowed it down a bit) it's so much faster now!

[g]

[Adrian Brentnall]

> Then look in the application and system logs in particular for the red

Hi Robin No red errors - but a scattering of yellow exclamation marks

event ID 51 - An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk1\D during a paging operation.

the only red errors are id 7000 The SupportSoft Sprocket Service (dellsupportcenter) service failed to start due to the following error: The system cannot find the file specified.

The system's on its 2nd hard drive - the first one failed after about 6 months....

I'm pretty sure that I have a second new spare hard drive (courtesy of Dell). I have Acronis, and could easily clone the current system drive - would that be a plan ?

Thanks Adrian

[The Natural Philosopher]

expect a typical well used home machines disk to be dead in 4 years on average

[Invisible Man]

>>>>>>>> Then look in the application and system logs in particular for the red

I trashed one seagate barracuda in 15 months at home and have trashed 2 hard drives at work over the years. Amazes me that some people do not back up anything.

[brass monkey]

I use ghost 14. Install XP from scratch (ages back) and image it to D: (and NAS + a copy) Every few months, pull the image back, add any recent updates, re-ghost it to D: and NAS etc etc. I also have - 'docs & settings', 'favourites' and 'outlook express store' on D:

15 mins and you've recovered the machine.

[John Williamson]

XP, which I find slows down over time. A fresh install every year or so gets the performance back where it should be, though that may be partly psychological. I also find that it gets less stable over time, and, no, I don't visit dodgy download sites, though I do tend to push the limits with what I use the computers for, which means I notice any problems early on.

[Adrian Brentnall]

Thanks - good to know I'm not alone ! As one can't easily contact the people @ Netfusion, you have to rely on the folks who populate the support group - and they say, somewhat unscientifically, that Fusion 'uses a computer hard' (!) I know that Fusion generates HTML from its own database, and the problems yesterday were on editing a 160-page site, the particular problem page having a very large table structure on it... I have had the program crash under other conditions, but yesterday was particularly bad / frequent....

I'm planning on moving away from Fusion - but have work to do on my 30+ websites in the meantime!

Thanks Adrian

[tony sayer]

Well I find that it all seems fine, just runs does what we need and haven't seen any lock up's for a very long time now..

And that's on all the machines, let alone the WIN 7 engined ones the only WIN that we don't give house room to is Vista!..

So if it slows what's the reason ?.. Why?...

[tony sayer]

Yes capt'n, they sure don't make them like thy used to. Just bought a couple of Samsung drives to try them. One review said that they were very quiet .. someone else's idea of quiet isn't what mine is;!..

Suppose that what's been mentioned above might be an indicator, perhaps a disk scan might be in order?..

[Adrian Brentnall]

HI Tony

We had a couple of power outages here before Christmas. Amazing just how quiet the house and the office become without the cheery hum of PCs, skyboxes, fridges and all that stuff!

Pretty sure I did one of those a month or so ago..... but you're right - might be a plan Might also bite the bullet and clone the existing hard drive (thinks - must get the copy-from and copy-to the right way round!)

The current disk is a Hitachi, the unused spare is a Western Digital (Dell-supplied when the first 'dell' disk expired after 6 months!)

Seems odd that XP is coughing up warnings, but no 'Oh F*ck I've died' messages.... or perhaps they happen so suddenly that it doesn't get a chance to report them ?

Many years ago, in a kind of Dilbert moment, the (un-technical, but well-intentioned) Manager of our department suggested that we fit our Automatically-guided forktrucks with a scrolling alpha-numeric display - so that we / they could display diagnostic messages like 'processor failed'. He went kinda quiet when we pointed out that, if the uP was dead then the chances of getting it to display such a message were a bit slim....

....but times have moved on since then.... haven't they ?

Adrian

[Robin]

I am a bit surprised that so few are red - but having loads of ignorance I am used to often being surprised ;(

Well it can't do any harm if you have a spare hard disk (and would be another way of backing up your data). But given the lock-ups happen most with Netobjects Fusion I'd be inclined also (and first) to remove and re-install that package. And also as others have said (i) check the hard disk for errors and (ii) check the memory. (At least, I think someone suggested you check the memory but I can't find now who/where/how. One way would be to use the Dell diagnostics: with a Vostro 200: start it; when you see the DELL logo press ; select Diagnostics from the menu and press ; then select "Test Memory" (or indeed "Test System" and check the lot).)

HTH (and that others will chip in fast if I've erred).

[Adrian Brentnall]

Can never have too many backups! The important data _should_ be on the external drive, but you never know...

Mmmm - but it seems to be a 'feature' of the package, (based on other online comments) rather than a defective install...

Not a bad idea - might just do that....

Thanks Adrian

[John Williamson]

Dunno, I just know that it does, and slowly gets more and more unstable with time.

The only machine that wll run 7 is the only one that doesn't seem to suffer, but that's the only one that's got a lot of reserve capacity.

[Mark]

Trouble is there are lots of things that could cause random lockups. I had one PC where it took me ages to track down the problem which turned out to be a BIOS bug.

[John Rumm]

Rather than guessing, turn on SMART monitoring in the BIOS if you have it. That will report early indications of drive failure. Meanwhile install a copy of SpeedFan and use that to check the drives SMART parameters. It will tell you if any of the logs kept by the drive itself indicate any problems lurking (such as failures to spin up, or the need to reallocate too many bad sectors).

Nope, dumb error messages are at large in the wild!

[AlanD]

Sounds like faulty memory to me, and that those applications happen to use the affected area. If there are 2 or more DIMMS, try removing 1 (so running on half the memory) and see if it crashes. Swap and try with the other. It's unilkely that both are faulty (but posible I guess)

[John Rumm]

It could result in a complete lockup. You would expect no response - even the keyboard status LEDs such as caps lock would not toggle when you push the key.

However over temperature of the processor can also have a similar symptom. However in that case the problem usually appears after a period of use, and goes away after a period of "off" time.