So, my home computer (Dell Dimension 8300, 2.6Ghz P4, 512MB Ram) is having some issues…
If you shut the computer off, it goes to the Dell Dimension booting screen (where you can pick boot menu or setup) then goes to a prompt screen, for like 10 minutes, until it finally boots Windows… the prompt screen allows no input at all.
The only thing I installed recently was drivers for our new printer… but we don’t restart often, so that’s not necessarily what is causing the issue.
Any idea what this could be? I’m doing a full backup right now onto our laptop, just in case it gets any worse…
I may just re-install windows… we have other issues (like an empty registry key that won’t go away and causes a Sys32 window to open every time we reboot).
We never downloaded the whole SP2 crap due to having other programs that will suposedly have problems. WIth talking to my dad (since he does this stuff for a living) he stated its one of those things that you never know. At the time that all came about he had done it to 5 computers and 1 of them totally took a shit. So he was going to look but it was never persued as a priority.
Something came up later where I could download just seritain priority things and we did that.
This most reacent one last week that I installed was just my normal weekly rutine of checking for new updates and they had nothing to do with SP2.
Last time ths happend when it didin’t want to start up the dummy lights on the back of the computer were showing an error, but then it magically when away. AT the same time I was on the phone talking with my dad and we were troubleshooting it.
He said to not worry about it unless it does it again but to back it up. Well I guess Jenn shut down the computer for what ever reason and now we are going from there.
She is going to rebuild the machine when she wakes up before the game today. I just hope that when we re do all these updates that it doesn’t do it again.
The guys in my PC group at work always say to NOT to the updates as soon as they come out. They say to wait a week or two… until Microsoft figures out what is not working on them. If she re-installs… skip the couple of newest updates. The update we loaded and had trouble was more than a couple of weeks ago. I think it was last fall.
Make sure you do not turn on the automatic updates…
See I’ve never had a problem with Windows updates or SP2 ever, except for when Windows is set to automatically download updates and people just let the notification hang in the taskbar forever that updates have been downloaded and are ready to install, they seem to interfere with printing and networking services.
If it’s really a problem and you can’t uninstall the updates from Control Panel, the next best thing would be to boot to an XP CD and run Windows restore. It won’t blow out the partition and you won’t lose any data but it reinstalls all the critical OS files. You may have to reinstall additional software as it rewrites the registry.
