Computer Screw-Up Question

[thealmighty]

Kinda like SkyDog, my computer cratered and I had to reformat and reinstall windowsXP Pro (had WinME before crash). I don't know if there is some hardware/bad hardrive sector problem, but my computer will NOT SHUT DOWN.

No matter what I try, all it does is reboot. Start/turn off = reboot...Power button off =reboot... everything just reboots, never will shut down. I shut down by turning off power, and when it comes back, it never does the "bad shutdown, checking drive" like WinME used to do. I figured someone on here may know, or have some idea, what I need to check.

I don't know if this is seperate, or another symptom of "it is time for a new one," but when I try to run Rise of Nations, it won't, and when I ctrl/alt/delete to end the task, it has the CPU usage at 100%, but as soon as the program closes, CPU usage drops to 3%.

I have 256k ram, btw, and plenty of hard drive space. Any other info needed?

Thanks.

[EagleFan]

Uh oh, that's the first sign of the dawning of the age of teh machine. Beware!!!!

I'll give my brother a call. He had a nightmare of a time when he first installed XP and if I recall he had weird things sort of like that happening. I don't have XP so I can't be much help to you if it is an XP issue.

Edited for me spelling mistakes.

[thealmighty]

Thanks, EagleFan.

[Marc Vaughan]

When it doesn't shutdown next time - presuming you can still interact with it press CTRL-ALT-DEL and bring up the 'Task Manager' click 'end task' on all applications visible and after they have closed, then try shutting down.

If that still doesn't work then go through the processes one by one killing them and attempting to shutdown.

Chances are one of your components/programs isn't playing fair and is stopping your system from shutting down.

If you take a methodical approach to this then you can probably work out which one and from there rectify the problem properly (rather than having to do this every time).

Hope this helps,

Marc

[EagleFan]

He's not home at the moment but I will get back to you once I find out what he had to do. Try Marc's suggestions first though, for all I know that is what he ended up doing to get it to work.

Something wasn't playing nicely with XP from if I remember correctly, and I think it might have been driver related.

Keep in mind that my memory might not be what it once was.

[thealmighty]

Thanks for replying, Marc. When I do press CTRL-ALT-DEL and bring up the 'Task Manager' there are no tasks listed before I try to shut down.

EagleFan, thanks again for the effort.

[Marc Vaughan]

Originally posted by thealmighty
Thanks for replying, Marc. When I do press CTRL-ALT-DEL and bring up the 'Task Manager' there are no tasks listed before I try to shut down.
EagleFan, thanks again for the effort.

I don't have XP to hand (got 2k on this portable) - but I presume there is a processes tab? - if so then is that empty also?

[Marc Vaughan]

PS. I'm pretty sure theres a flag in the XP registry which allows you to specify a 'hard*' shutdown by setting/clearing it.

If you aren't terribly familiar with PC's then I'd suggest using an application such as TweakXP to set this flag if you can't track down the problem using the technique I've suggested.

All this flag will do is turn off the 'safety' catch which makes an application save its data when you ask Windows to shutdown, this will have absolutely no effect in 99% of situations.

[EagleFan]

Okay, all I got from my brother is that he had driver problems and he had to go out and manually reinstall a lot of his hardware. With some of his hardware he just had to do a generic driver install until he downloaded an updated driver for XP and then change the settings to use that driver.

This was very early when XP came out, he has to be the first for everything. I think the driver situation has gotten bette since then so you might be able to find the right driver on the XP disk and not have to gothrough that whole generic crap he went through.

[thealmighty]

Marc, the processes tab has about 20 things in it- most of which I have no clue what they do.

EagleFan, drivers are a big problem as my piece of crap GeForce 32 meg card would not upgrade (said it was not XP certified, or some such) its driver, which I am assuming is the Rise of Nations trouble spot.

Anyway, Thanks so much for both of your time and effort. I really appreciate it. Maybe I should have studied computers at college instead of psychology. :)