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Captain Red

There’s always something.

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For as long as I've used them, computers have never worked %100 for more then four months at a time. There is almost always some inexplicable problem that will arise that you have no choice but to put up with. A sticky key, the odd random reset or blue screen.

Currently, My computer crashes randomly. Somtimes it will prompted with a error message that will name a dll file or an access violation error, or it will just lock up. And sometimes it won't even start. Sometimes when it doses start, it will announce that windows changed something for no reason. For some stupid reason, I can't change my homepage from 'blank', and my default homepage is '???' I ran some anti-spy ware thing and now Systray.exe won't start automatically.

I can never fix all the problems. All I seem to be able to do is change them to less annoying ones or brake the computer.

I just want to know if I am the only person who always seem to have a bunch of annoying problems with there computer?

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I have odd problems with my computers, too, but not many and I know how to fix most of them. My laptop eats up CD-Roms quickly and won't run grubinstall or Cygwin, which are the two I can't seem to fix. But on my Alienware, it doesn't want to install ATI drivers at all in Linux ('cause of the distro, I think) and in Windows the IME I use to type in Japanese tends to install everything on my external HD by default. I could just disconnect my external HD when I install it but I'm too lazy to go through the process again.

And then there's my old computer that won't die. Which is a good thing, but odd nonetheless.

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It's exactly what I experience with my computer(s)...

What I'd like to know, is what actually causes a computer to lock-up, reboot, or crash? Is it an overflow of memory or something like that? I don't know Jack Schitt about computers so perhaps I'm asking for an obvious answer...

Anyhow, I recognize Ct_red_pants' problem completely. It's been that way even before I got Internet, so it couldn't be an Internet-only thing...

Oh well, I'll let the professionals take it from here.

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On average I go about a year and a half between formats, unless something terrible happens. And I'm often amazed at how many people are experiencing inexplicable problems with their computers - I don't seem to ever have a problem I can't work out in less than an afternoon. I guess it all comes down to security and maintenance. Defrag regularly, scan for viruses, run Ad-aware once a week, don't use Internet Explorer, and keep your HD clean. I think those should solve 90 percent of people's problems (barring serious software or hardware issues).

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Despite how bad it sounds, I really enjoy when lots of little computer annoyances are exterminated all at once. I feel at peace.

I downloaded Ad-Aware and gave it a run... which returned nearly 300 objects that had to be quarantined. I'm also going to stop using IE and check out Mozilla. :)

I'm not very computer savvy, so even little recommendations like that make a world of difference for me. Thanks!

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My comp occasionally freezes during bootup, and I get this odd little error when I start the Add/Remove Programs utility, but otherwise it does pretty well, with an average uptime of about three weeks.

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I get this odd crap that sometimes won't happen for a while and sometimes daily.

Everything just slowly freezes to a stop, the taskbar ceases functioning, and I can't run any programs. If I have some open, I can't bring them up via alt-tab usually, and even if I can, they won't work.

The only things that remain working are the KB and mouse.

ctrl-alt-del naturally does nothing, I have to reboot using the reset button.

I suspect it's SoulSeek: I didn't use it for a while now and things were stable. Also when I close it, Windows XP gives an error message.

Guess I'll just have to stop using it completely and see if I get the stupid crash ever again to be sure.

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When a problem like that happens, I just format the hard drive. Why bother working out what went wrong? Especially if you've already taken every care that you can to stop the thing breaking.

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My biggest problem has always been mice and video cards. I've never had a problem with HD's in the history of my computer use(unless you count the time our 8088 tried to make the jump from dual floppies to a whopping 32 megs of storage).

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Come to think of it, and now that we're at it, I've had Windows 98 on this machine since mid 2001. System resources are still fine, and there are no issues, except boot up or shut down freezes, though they seldom occur, and always have since I set it up initially.

Lord FlatHead said:
Defrag regularly, scan for viruses, run Ad-aware once a week, don't use Internet Explorer, and keep your HD clean.

I don't really follow this advice... well, I do defragment once in a while when I remember... but rarely.

Espi said:
I suspect it's SoulSeek: I didn't use it for a while now and things were stable. Also when I close it, Windows XP gives an error message.

Heh, that shit disabled my cable connection by messing with the registry. Good thing that out of curiosity I messed with the Soulseek FAQ when I was installing it, found a note about a weird effect on connections in Windows 98 and such, and pasted it onto a text file just in case; or else I would have been stranded without a connection... billions of bytes away from the internet and without a clue as to the cause of the issue.

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chilvence said:
When a problem like that happens, I just format the hard drive. Why bother working out what went wrong? Especially if you've already taken every care that you can to stop the thing breaking.

I've already don't that five or six times.

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The (major) issues I have with Slsk at current:

  • Crashes on quit, pretty much every time. Quas' told me that had probably had to do with unloading a lot of memory at one time
  • Sometimes if I "restart" slsk, the first copy hasn't closed properly and is eating up 90-95% of my processing power, slowing things to near-halt, requiring a simple alt-tab and close
  • Songs people are uploading from me end up in download list O_o That's only an issue with slsk 1.54b3i though, and anything that beta is bound to be kind of fucked :P

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I don't reformat. Maximum - wipe out Windows and install it from scratch.

Now, however, I'm close to reformatting my Win98 machine, cause it is terribly slow, crashes too frequently and tends to lock up when I write to a certain place in the hard disk.

ANYWAY...

The most common reason to computer problems is lots of crap on the PC. My friend bought a new and very powerful computer, installed WinXP and it took him about two weeks to bring it to a completely messed up condition. Because he downloaded and installed every piece of shit he could find, because "some friend told him it's a good program". He had the computer for a couple of months only and already had to reinstall once, and is close to doing at again.

So, yes, keep your HD clean, don't install stuff you don't need, don't click on any banners, don't visit any "kewl" sites (not that I need to tell this to you). On the other hand don't install too much "protection" software. Norton Systemworks (or the Antivirus of choice) + Virus Auto-protection Active + Ad-Aware = enough. You can install a firewall if you really want (I don't like them).

Do manual scans once a week or so, it should be enough.

Faulty hardware is another common reason for computers to lock up / crash randomly. Especially in Win98. I had a faulty motherboard which caused Windows to crash literally every 3 minutes, and it wouldn't even let me do a clean reinstall - it just froze during the process. And it's not like it was a serious problem - every device worked, there were no problems in DOS mode, etc.

I think that my current problems are due to a partially defective motherboard too, so reinstalling may not fix anything. But what the heck, as soon as I setup my new machine, I will try.

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Currently on dsm's computer:

- Can't run my firewall because it blocks the IP adress of my internet provider, which means that my internet connection will go down if I started the firewall. I need to spend some time figuring out how my firewall operates so I can solve this little pest.

- Some program decides to stop responding. Often when I try to 'end task' the non-responding shit, I get the good ol' blue screen.

- Certain web pages I visit cause my computer to freeze, regardless of what browser I use.

- Sometimes, when using Opera, my comp freezes if my connection downloads or uploads too much data at once.

- (I've experienced that windows freezes my comp when it's in the middle of shutting down - I haven't experienced it recently, so maybe formatting my hard drive did help and I don't have that problem anymore, but I'm not sure).

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Ah! Last night I left my pc on to resume downloading while I'm asleep. I wake up, walk up to my pc to find that it had restarted for some mysterious reason. I log in and receive an error message. My 'LSA Shell' had crashed. I have no idea what the hell that is. Then I find out that Norton Antivirus had mysteriously turned off email scanning. Also, internet explorer couldn't show any page whatsoever, because I kept receiving the message that the modem was already in use (it wasn't). I recovered my system settings from a week ago and all problems were solved, except the one with the 'modem in use' message. I keep getting it every now and then. I have no idea what's going on.

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My older laptop would always shut off if you bumped it or put it down too hard.

I hated that so much. Now I can put my new one down as hard as I want.

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Uptime: 2w 2d 16:26:43..still no problems. /me knocks on wood.

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Yup, if I come to a point where my computer seems to be getting bogged down irreconcilably, I just re-format. It gets easier to do as time goes on, and things run so smoothly after you manage doing it and re-installing everything.

It helps if you have two hard drives, as well.

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Relica Religia said:

It helps if you have two hard drives, as well.

Ah yes, I recently got a new hard drive and it sure came in handy when I had to format my old hard drive recently.

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Disorder said:
Ah! Last night I left my pc on to resume downloading while I'm asleep. I wake up, walk up to my pc to find that it had restarted for some mysterious reason. I log in and receive an error message. My 'LSA Shell' had crashed. I have no idea what the hell that is. Then I find out that Norton Antivirus had mysteriously turned off email scanning. Also, internet explorer couldn't show any page whatsoever, because I kept receiving the message that the modem was already in use (it wasn't). I recovered my system settings from a week ago and all problems were solved, except the one with the 'modem in use' message. I keep getting it every now and then. I have no idea what's going on.

This thread here is discussing it.

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I just reinstalled Windows XP yesterday. As soon as I tried to play anything with it, it crashed. Eventually I found out my CPU doesn't seem to like being overclocked any more (used to run fine), but oh well.

After solving the crashing, I play some more Morrowind, and after a while the screen starts to flicker and switch off then back on again randomly. Great. So I played around for a while with my video card settings (it wasn't my monitor, since none of it happened in Windows). Eventually I just reseated my video card, and that fixed it.

Then, after being connected to the net for only about 30 mins, I find I have that new Sasser worm, yay. I've only just got rid of it since my virus scanner (AVG) seems to have only just updated with it.

Hopefully that's all my problems sorted for the moment though ;) It's actually nowhere near as bad as my computer was before though, when I had some faulty RAM which caused all sorts of random problems...

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Yea computers are assholes Im not even gunna take the time to explain all the annoying shit mine does.

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About three and a half years ago, I got a new computer. It was a P3 800 MHZ with an ATI AIW Rage Pro. About 3 months after I got it, anything remotely entertaining caused these weird artifacts to appear on the screen that signaled a reboot. This happened with CS in OpenGL and Software video modes, Quake 3, even Solitaire for fucking Windows ME. I took the damn thing back to the guy who built the computer and he couldn't find anything wrong with it. He thought the video card was overheating or defective and replaced it twice, but the same thing still happened. A friend offered to stress-test the video card and it worked without a hitch. So what the hell was wrong with my computer?

It wasn't until about 2 and a half years later when I decided to upgrade the video card to a Ti4200 in hopes of preparing for Doom 3. I noticed that the Ti4200 had a minimum power requirement so that meant upgrading the power supply unit as well. I opened the computer up and discovered that the power supply had a PSU of 125W. In comparison my sister's store-bought computer, which was bought around the same time as mine, had a PSU of 185W. It was then that I guessed it was the PSU that was screwing things up. I guessed right; the old video card worked flawlessly.

In addition to that, whenever the hard drive was filled up to around 10 GB, it would make this awful scratching sound whenever it was accessed. Thank goodness I replaced it.

Now I have a P4 2.4 GHz but not all things are cheery. I reused some of the parts from my old computer, including a LS-120 floppy drive (a floppy drive that accepted Imation's 120 MB floppy disks in addition to the 1.4 MB disks). Now my computer cannot detect it at all. This sucks since I was planning to update the motherboard's bios. When starting up, the motherboard says it cannot detect the hard drive at all, but when I reboot it finds it and I see the Win98 splash screen.

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