Computer Woes

[Rick]

A few days ago I started have computer problems. When I would turn on the computer in the morning it started freezing up when it reached the screen “Loading your personal settings”. After hitting reset two or three times it would complete the boot process.

My first thought was a problem with the video card because I have had trouble with that in the past. I put in a different video card but that was no help.

Next I started thinking I may have to reformat and reload WinXP. I had the new SP2 to WinXP. I tried that but it just made things worse.

I booted in Safe mode and ran Fix-It by Ontrack. I ran the Fix Wizard. The report at the end said I need to run chkdsk /f on C: drive.

After running Fix-It and chkdsk /f I as back to normal.

That one really had me worried. I was already planning on what I needed to back up to DVD before reformatting.

Anyone else have a favorite program that saved

[Rick]

Thursday I started having the same problems again. I tried running Fix-It, chkdsk /f, and several other utility programs to no avail.

I was able to get it to boot normally just 2 times by Sunday, but I was able to boot in Safe mode.

Saturday another potential disaster struck. I am running a 4 drive raid array where two drives are working together and two drives mirror/backup what is on the first two drives. I got a CRITICAL error message during boot up saying one drive was bad. A trip to Office Depot for a new drive and I was able to restore that drive.

Now I am thinking I am going to have to reformat and start from scratch. I am running out of ideas. Sunday morning, while waiting for Office Depot to open, (I am planning on buying the 160 GB drive they have on sale and try to backup everything on my raid array) I decide to use my other computer and look at the WinXP help. It has a troubleshooting on startup and shutdown.

Going through the troubleshooting steps it wants you to check devices before getting to software. I was pretty sure my problem was software related so I skipped that step. Basically it says to run msconfig and uncheck the services box on the General tab.

I did this and the computer booted.

I then went to the Services tab and started adding items back doing half of what was unchecked at a time and rebooting until I reached the point where it wouldn¡¦t boot. I was able to narrow it down to the one item that was causing my computer to not boot correctly.

I left that unchecked and then uninstalled that program from my computer.

Everything has been working correctly since.

Now I am going to take a look at the WinXP restore feature, that I turned off to save disk space. I am going to see about using it before I add any new programs.

Of course now I know what to look for.

I never did find a utility program that would check this out automatically. ļ

[Lee Carson]

May we all give thanks to God for Rick and his superior talents
Lee