I am priarily a Mac user, I do grahic & web design etc. I recently bought a cheap older PC to use for validating my work on the Windows platform. The computer came with 98, I need XP on it. I got XP installed (had to change the hard drive ribbon to an 80 wire ribbon) but now when it starts up, it freezes up after a few seconds. Before opening IE or doing anything. The computer has 64 MB RAM, which I would be upgrading if I thought this computer is worth putting any $$ at all into - 64 is supposed to meet the minimum requirements for XP so although I expect it to be molasses slow I do expect it to run the system software. I have it hooked up to a Samsung LCD screen (onboard graphics card - Compaq board) and Windows keyboard and USB mouse.
Also, the computer ran fine under 98 (tested it for a bit when I got it, and previous owner is a friend who swears there were no problems under 98). I don't get blue screen or anything, computer just totally freezes and doesn't respond. When I restart it goes through proper verification and then starts up, freezes again. So, I have no idea wher to start - hardware issue? Software issue?
When installing a larger main drive, how do I get the drivers copied onto the slave before I take out the main one I wonder is there a simple way of doing this, I am using Windows XP home edition, the PC is an oldish one and isn't any specific make, so I can't get any clever programs from the manufacturers site
I'm upgrading my hard drive and here's the order I'm thinking of... 1. BIOS update. I know, if it ain't broke don't fix it but my board is about 2 years old and the current BIOS revision is fairly stable and comlpete plus I figured if I'm ever going to do a BIOS update I should do it immediately preceeding a clean install Also, supposedly my ASUS board has some feature that will prevent you from being screwed even if you have a bad flash. OS with required serial drivers. not really sure what that involves but in another thread I was told I needed to have the serial drivers ready to go and push F6 when it asks for them at the beginning of the install (I've seen that screen on previous installs but I've never had to mess with it).
I recently bought a new system with XP home already installed. Now I find that I should have installed the new SATA hard drive for better perfomance with my new P4 dual layered processor. I have ordered the new SATA 80 GB drive and would expect that when I install the XP on it I will have to call microsoft to activate it on the hard drive (since it was originally installed on the hard drive that I got with the new system). Any issues here or just call and explain the upgrade during the activation? (Understood that I will have to reinstall my other software again) As a follow up to this, would there be any problem slaving the original drive on the same IDE ribbon as the new SATA drive?
Every 3-4days my computer would freeze up while booting up at windows XP screen and scroll bars would freeze.What bohers me about this is i am sure what could be causing this. I use avg as my antivirus,and run A2, spybot,regcleaner, tweaknow on a weekly basis. I keep my system really clean, so now i am wondering is it my HD. PC: Win XP-PRO, 800MHZ AMD Athlon, 1024mb,80gHD. I did what cleaning i could in safemode, it still freeze on scroll bars. I tried last good config, result is the same. The last time i got pass the freezing was by doing a restore.
I have 2 drives, one with Windows and such, and the other with about 1,000 games that my girlfriend plays. She let her grandson on, unsupervised, and the next thing is a trashed system drive. Unfortunately, there was no way to save it, so I did a format and clean reinstall of XP Home. Goback was on the drive, and there was no way to uninstall it before the reinstall. The reinstall went fine, but the GAME drive is virtually inaccessible. It doesn't show in My Computer, but does show in Admin Tools, Disk Management. However, the drive name is shown as F(F. It should either be D: or F: ( there are 2 optical drives). I can't change the name or drive letter. I get the error "the drive is locked".
I tried Partition Magic, and it will change the info, temporarily. Also, PM shows the drive as *.F It doesn't give any error message, and says the change has been applied, but it obviously hasn't. I searched this forum for "hard drive locked" and followed suggestions that I had not tried previously. The smiley replaced a colon; the entry should read F(F. Sometimes I think I might know what I'm doing, and then I realize, maybe not.
It's a mole hill of a problem, but it is a bit annoying to have to click on my principal drive ("C") every time I'm doing a "save". I have enclosed an excerpt of a screen shot of my "save as" window to display how the default drive being automatically selected is the "D" drive rather than the "C" drive that I use primarily. To be honest, I don't know whether this can be corrected by a software change, or whether it's the way the two hard drives are connected in my computer.
This is my DAD's personal computer now, we are trying to format his hard drive i get to the point where it asks me whether i want to proceed, i put yes and hit enter, it then doesn't start formatting, it just say C:WINDOWS?
I recently upgraded the hard drive on my computer from a 5200rpm drive to a much needed 7200 80gig maxtor. When I start up the computer and click my user name, windows xp professional logs me in and the first item to load is my norton (with an exclamation point). none of my other tasks in the toolbar load and the computer is kind of paused. i timed it to last 45 seconds. and then suddenly the screen refreshes/all my tasks load. I cant seem to figure out why there is such a pause. The only start up items I am allowing (via msconfig) are for the anti virus software and a dialer for my verizon dsl connection
bsod at the starting of the hard drive and need to be fix and i can't go to safe mode and here is the bsod code: 0x000000d1 (0x00000000, 0x00000007, 0x00000000, 0x00000000) on a acer veriton 5200 running windows xp home with sp2 or sp3 i don't remember which service pack
I have a lot of games on my c drive, i would like to move them to my external drive and be able to start from windows desktop. I am not sure how to associate the programs to start from the desktop because the games were automaticly installed into c drive
I was working on the computer yesterday when it froze up on me. I didn't think much of it, so I rebooted and continued what I was doing. Later that same day, the computer locked up about 2-3 more times. Then I started hearing ticking noises coming from inside. I shut it off after it froze again. When I powered it back on, the screen during bootup that displays my Hard drive's status (I have four HDs, paired up with one another), says that the first set of hard drives (which is where the OS is on) is healthy, and on the other set, it gets an error with red text. I rebooted, and sure enough, they were both healthy again.
This is where it messes up. It starting loading the Windows logo, with the progress bar. The next thing it does is go black. It doesn't boot at all after that. I have to reboot everytime. I then tried to boot in safe mode. Black screen again. I tried all the possible options in the boot menu, none of them worked. That's where my first problem takes off. So I now have a non-booting OS. The next thing I do is insert the Windows boot disk, and installed Windows XP on the same HD the original OS was on (Don't ask why, I don't know either). After the installation, Windows booted up fine, except I was running on a fresh install. Which how I'm on this site...........
When I start windows Xp the bit right after Welcome I see my desktop background frozen for about 30 seconds. I can move the mouse but nothing appears to be happening with the hard drive for 30 seconds.
this problem for a while now and ive been trying everything i can think off. Basically when i start the computer up the windows login screen freezes. I have to press ctrl + alt + delete to get the login box to come up, and i can login that way. That's fine just a bit annoying . Secondly, When i look through my files in windows, even click a file on desktop or browse the internet, the taskbar and my desktop will freeze. I can move my mouse, but cant click anything, icons, start menu, right click - nothing. To get it back i bring up task manager and close it, then i can click the taskbar etc, i have no idea why that works i dont close explorer.exe or anything . I've ran anti-virus scans with avast and nod32 (i only have avast installed), anti-spyware scans with Spybot and superantispyware and nothing was found. I've disabled startup programs with msconfig, defragmented and updated video card drivers. but it still freezes. Specs are beside my forum name, and im using xp home.
I have is during start up, one time out of three or so I get to the log in screen where I click my name but a second before its completly there the computer freezes up. The Icon and Name are about 10% faded in and I'm left hanging. Even if i restart my computer 50 times I get the same problem untill I hit F8 during startup and go to "Last Settings that Worked".
This is bareable untill this time, It didnt work, as usual and I went through F8 etc. When I got into windows it started to load about half my icons and locked up :S. So here I am in safe mode, just want this problem to stop. Im a Uni student in my final semester of my degree, don't have time for this.
I am having a problem that just started about 2 days ago. My computer, XP home edn., will be working fine, and then I suddenly hear a little squeak coming from the computer, kinda like something being pulled over a pulley and then bang, the whole thing just freezes up on me.So I'll hold the power button to shut it down, start it back up again and sometimes it'll come right back up, like normal. Other times, it'll make that noise again during the start up and it'll just freeze at whatever screen it's at. I just took it in yesterday b/c at the start up screen it was saying something like cannot boot from CD. insert system CD when it was at the very start, saying how much memory and system, etc.The guy said something was just loose, fixed it, and then it worked fine. But it just started up again, with the whole squeak-freeze deal.
I have a Dell computer where one of the loading .dll files came up 'missing' one day, so it won't boot. I want to get all the photos and other docs off the hard drive. I had downloaded one version of linux and was able to see the files on the internal hard drive, but was unable to copy them to a memory stick or external hard drive. Now I've downloaded ubuntu and booted off a memory stick... this time, it's telling me that the internal hard drive has all kinds of bad sectors and won't let me access any of the files on there.
Sometimes when I click my start button it freezes the whole toolbar, this doesn't make sense as I have a reasonably powerful machine (check specs) and when I check task manager my cpu usage is at 2-4% and I have less then 20 processes running taking up 200,000k or less. I once had a virus on my computer but I followed the steps, removed it and formatted my hdd then reinstalled fresh windows xp pro and now this issue has come up. Just recently (after the problem appeared) I tried going to run regedt32 Hkey_Current_usercontrol paneldesktopMenuShowDelay and lowered that to 0 in a hope of reducing freezes but I haven't seen any difference.
Windows XP Media Edition and here's my problem. I told XP to use the CHKDSK utility on startup, but whenever it reaches step 4 37%, it just freezes and I'm forced to restart the computer. When I restart, the same thing happens. Is there any shortcut to bypass the CHKDSK? This all started because whenever I ran a full virus scan or spyware scan I would get a BSOD In_Page_Kernel_Error... So i tried running them in safe mode and then I would get a IQL BSOD. Eventually I decided I should try to run CHKDSK and it has lead me to this dead end. If I could just figure out a shortcut to bypass it, I would be happy because the computer actually works fine, I just suspected spyware so that's why I began attempting to disinfect it.
My Laptop running on windows XP Home just fails to boot up. It also does not start in the Safe Mode, (system freezes).When I tried to boot using the Recovery CD, the system just shuts itself down. If I try using the CD to boot, it simply shuts down after a few minutes.
it first started with a trojan, i got one that keeps tryin to get through, but it keeps getting blocked by bitdeffender. now sometimes wen it starts up it gets very slow, and sometimes freezes so i restart and it will be fine. now i have had this for bout 3 months now cause i cnt find any way of getting rid of it, it was vundo trojan yesterday i tried to load it twice, first time it froze, so second time i tried to start it up it keep coming up with bitdeffender asking if i want to allow something, i didnt no what it was so i keep saying block, but it keep coming up again n again n again, i pressed allowed and it still keep coming up so i shut down the computer, cause i was in a rush
My laptop died and I removed the hard drive.i hooked the hard drive up to my new laptop via a SATA/IDE cable.
I can see the old hard drive in the E drive and it appears that all the contents are there by the size of the hard drive (same as when I had it in the old laptop) but I can only see, actually view, a very small percentage of the drive.
My goal: I want to transfer all old music, word documents and photos from old laptop into new laptop.
For many months now, XP has had problems booting - when it gets to the loading screen, it often freezes and I'm forced to restart time and time again. For a while, when I would play with the power supply on restarts, it would get through this problem, but recently, the computer has stopped booting at all. This has left me to think that perhaps all I need a new power supply, but I'm not entirely sure if that has anything to do with windows booting up, if anything at all. My previous story is the only knowledge I have to go on for the situation. Is this possible, or did the drive just crap out on
current HD going bad, have second HD installed and using as back but now i need to make the second HD my primary, can i do this without having to reformat in order to add booting files.
using XP. am having wild swings in my hard drive space go from 46.1 to 44.1 and sometimes in between. have not installed any new programs recently. what could be causing it and how do i correct also am noticing my laptop as slowed appreciablydo know whether the two problems are correlated
i have a Compaq nx 7400 .i was hahving a lot of problems with the computer so i decided to put a new hard drive in and reinstall XP . well i have the new hard drive in and started up the machine and changed the bott options to run from the dvd and all went fine until i should press the ENTER ( return ) button to install XP now . as soon as i did that the next window said no hard drive found . this was also happening on the old hard drive that was in the machine .
Today I noticed that what WAS my E drive is now called F and what was my F drive is now called G. I don't know how it happened, but it's wreaking havoc with Adobe Premiere because on all old projects I have to relocate all files on what were F that are now on G. It's also messing up my shortcuts.
I had this idea, see if anybody has an opinion about this. My wife has an old XP computer I want to buy her a new one but she doesn't like the vista and she wants to keep the old xp operating system. What I want to do is take the old hard drive and put it in the new computer as the master and take the new hard drive and put it in as the slave erasing the vista off it. Then using the master slave way can I transfer the xp operating system and all her files and data from the old hard drive to the new one.
