B
biglou
Alrighty, time for some more PC help. After 16 months of near flawless operation, the old Dell has started to get squirrelly on me.
System: Dell Dimension 8250, XP Home Vers 2002 Serv Pack 1, P4 2.4gig, 256meg ram.
FYI-All of these symptoms seemed to show up around the same time:
First thing I noticed was one day my resolution had reset to 600x800 or something, and my refresh rate had changed, causing very jerky scrolling, and kind of irritating my eyes the way the lighter colors seemed to pulse. I reset the resolution with no problems, but when I went to change the refresh rate for the video, I found that only a default was available, and no other rates were shown-not even grayed out. This was not how it was when I first set this PC up, so I investigated further. Found a yellow "!" for my video card under device manager, clicked buttons to reinstall drivers and all was well again, I was able to see multiple refresh rate choices again and bumped it up which solved that issue.
Second issue that came up a couple weeks ago was my sounds. I have some .wav files loaded in my Media folder that I had chosen as my critical stop sound, new mail arrival, etc. You know, sounds like Homer's "DOH!", etc. One day, I noticed my new mail sound had reset, along with several others, to their original default sounds. When I browsed to reset the sounds to the custom ones I had installed, I noticed the font on some of the file names had changed from black to blue. WTF? Also, I could install the sounds, but when I would highlight a sound, I would get an error popup that said something to the effect of "Windows cannot locate the file" or "File doesnt exist".
Lastly, anytime I go to either shut down and then start up, or just click "Restart", the computer will hang or lock up. Usually, I get the "Saving your personal settings" screen, then "Windows is shutting down", then the monitor goes black (not off, just black), and that's where things stop. I have to hold the power button in, and then on restart, I get the "Windows did not start normally" message in the very DOS-like white font on black background, and I have to use the arrow keys to choose from several choices like starting in safe mode, or going back to last known good settings-which is the one I choose, and it starts normally with all settings and sounds as I have set them up.
I knew these wouldn't help, but I have run disk cleanup and defrag to no avail. I've also run a virus scan of all files with McAfee and nothing shows up.
Any ideas? Need more info? Thanks.
System: Dell Dimension 8250, XP Home Vers 2002 Serv Pack 1, P4 2.4gig, 256meg ram.
FYI-All of these symptoms seemed to show up around the same time:
First thing I noticed was one day my resolution had reset to 600x800 or something, and my refresh rate had changed, causing very jerky scrolling, and kind of irritating my eyes the way the lighter colors seemed to pulse. I reset the resolution with no problems, but when I went to change the refresh rate for the video, I found that only a default was available, and no other rates were shown-not even grayed out. This was not how it was when I first set this PC up, so I investigated further. Found a yellow "!" for my video card under device manager, clicked buttons to reinstall drivers and all was well again, I was able to see multiple refresh rate choices again and bumped it up which solved that issue.
Second issue that came up a couple weeks ago was my sounds. I have some .wav files loaded in my Media folder that I had chosen as my critical stop sound, new mail arrival, etc. You know, sounds like Homer's "DOH!", etc. One day, I noticed my new mail sound had reset, along with several others, to their original default sounds. When I browsed to reset the sounds to the custom ones I had installed, I noticed the font on some of the file names had changed from black to blue. WTF? Also, I could install the sounds, but when I would highlight a sound, I would get an error popup that said something to the effect of "Windows cannot locate the file" or "File doesnt exist".
Lastly, anytime I go to either shut down and then start up, or just click "Restart", the computer will hang or lock up. Usually, I get the "Saving your personal settings" screen, then "Windows is shutting down", then the monitor goes black (not off, just black), and that's where things stop. I have to hold the power button in, and then on restart, I get the "Windows did not start normally" message in the very DOS-like white font on black background, and I have to use the arrow keys to choose from several choices like starting in safe mode, or going back to last known good settings-which is the one I choose, and it starts normally with all settings and sounds as I have set them up.
I knew these wouldn't help, but I have run disk cleanup and defrag to no avail. I've also run a virus scan of all files with McAfee and nothing shows up.
Any ideas? Need more info? Thanks.