Sweed
06-27-2006, 02:31 PM
4 year old emachine (don't laugh it's worked great up til now). P4-2GHz, 1.256 gig ram. NTFS file system on 60g hd.
This week, as the title says, started to sporadically lock up. Usually happens when trying to open a folder or look at the hd. Double click and instant lock (arrow with hour glass showing), absolutly nothing works. No keyboard response so can't get to task manager to see anything that might be going on.
I did get up when this happened this am and got something to eat and let it sit for about 45 minutes or a little more to see if maybe it was just trying to work through something. Still locked after all that time. The only way out is to hold in the power button until it shuts off and then restart. Most of the time I can get back to desk top but occasionally it will lock on the welcome screen.
So last night I used the restore disks and went back to factory delivered specs. Went to windows update and d'loaded all updates it indicated I needed, remember this is a 2002 copy of xp so it took awhile. All going well, no lockups.
Installed Norton, Winpatrol, indeo (?) codec, ati drivers for radeon 9550, and firefox, . Surfed the net for about half hour and went to bed. No lockups.
This morning I installed spyware blaster, spybot search and destroy, adware personal, and my lexmark printer. Keep a folder on my desktop with my name that I keep patches, setup files, and other d'loads. Moved my backups of these into the folder. Clicked on a few of these folders just to double check if I forgot anything and bang solid lockup. Power down and up (do this after every lockup), little later clicked on C:\ to look at folders on hd, lockup. Since then getting lot's of lockups, no set time but 99% of the time it's when I click on a folder. Had a couple where I just tried to move the mouse to find it locked (no hour glass just arrow) and once while on the net looking at drivers at ati.
I happen to be included in the ootp patch testing. Took a chance and d'loaded todays beta. Installed it and played for a couple of hours no problem. Never had a lockup at anytime with ootp this morning or earlier in the week when the trouble started. Clicked on all kinds of in game report links, player cards, etc.
Tried running with Norton off, winpatrol off, windows firewall turned off, msn messenger off, not anything else running besides xp. Did virus scan even though a fesh install, nothing.
The only other thing I did all week was to turn off windows indexing files (before the restore, it's running now) and was told to hit a button to apply attributes to all files. Was told this was safe and wasn't needed by most users and would free up memory and make the machine faster. First lockups started after this so I thought it might be the cause. Turned it back on and again applied attributes to all files. I can't believe this is it since restoring did not fix it and indexing is on by default on restore but thought I'd throw it out there.
So any ideas what to look at would be appreciated.
Thanks
Sweed
This week, as the title says, started to sporadically lock up. Usually happens when trying to open a folder or look at the hd. Double click and instant lock (arrow with hour glass showing), absolutly nothing works. No keyboard response so can't get to task manager to see anything that might be going on.
I did get up when this happened this am and got something to eat and let it sit for about 45 minutes or a little more to see if maybe it was just trying to work through something. Still locked after all that time. The only way out is to hold in the power button until it shuts off and then restart. Most of the time I can get back to desk top but occasionally it will lock on the welcome screen.
So last night I used the restore disks and went back to factory delivered specs. Went to windows update and d'loaded all updates it indicated I needed, remember this is a 2002 copy of xp so it took awhile. All going well, no lockups.
Installed Norton, Winpatrol, indeo (?) codec, ati drivers for radeon 9550, and firefox, . Surfed the net for about half hour and went to bed. No lockups.
This morning I installed spyware blaster, spybot search and destroy, adware personal, and my lexmark printer. Keep a folder on my desktop with my name that I keep patches, setup files, and other d'loads. Moved my backups of these into the folder. Clicked on a few of these folders just to double check if I forgot anything and bang solid lockup. Power down and up (do this after every lockup), little later clicked on C:\ to look at folders on hd, lockup. Since then getting lot's of lockups, no set time but 99% of the time it's when I click on a folder. Had a couple where I just tried to move the mouse to find it locked (no hour glass just arrow) and once while on the net looking at drivers at ati.
I happen to be included in the ootp patch testing. Took a chance and d'loaded todays beta. Installed it and played for a couple of hours no problem. Never had a lockup at anytime with ootp this morning or earlier in the week when the trouble started. Clicked on all kinds of in game report links, player cards, etc.
Tried running with Norton off, winpatrol off, windows firewall turned off, msn messenger off, not anything else running besides xp. Did virus scan even though a fesh install, nothing.
The only other thing I did all week was to turn off windows indexing files (before the restore, it's running now) and was told to hit a button to apply attributes to all files. Was told this was safe and wasn't needed by most users and would free up memory and make the machine faster. First lockups started after this so I thought it might be the cause. Turned it back on and again applied attributes to all files. I can't believe this is it since restoring did not fix it and indexing is on by default on restore but thought I'd throw it out there.
So any ideas what to look at would be appreciated.
Thanks
Sweed