Stroby

Ok, today I did a dusting (it wasn't too bad in there but still got a fair bit out) then I pushed all components in and I haven't had a bad start up yet but then there have only been 3 boots so far so I wouldn't be too hopeful that it has magically fixed by that. I have also run HD tune on my C drive and it gave it a health status Ok, but did highlight spin relay count in yellow, if that means anything I don't know. As for the RAM checks have been having hell trying to run either. I have no floppy drive (I was annoyed at this when I first got the dell but meh) so I cant do that option, a piece of Dell software I have never used refused to help me when I tried to burn either ISOs (now it wants to be bought). So I tried cdburn.exe only for some reason to I got cdburn.exe is not a valid win32 application error message, so I couldn't use that grrr. I was pretty sure you can't just burn the plain ISO using windows explorer but I wasn't 100% sure so I gave it a try booted with CD drive as primary drive and it skipped over that so I figured life couldn't be that simple. I also have a nice empty USB stick here but can't for the life of me discover how Memtest86 want it to get on the stick, I got their pre-compiled exe and tried to run it, 16bit DOS proudly told me that a sysmatec DLL failed which isn't surprising as I haven't had norton on my pc at all for about 2 years so I ignored that message, I get blank DOS window that then closes. So for the RAM tests that really was epic fail for getting it to work If I am doing anything wrong in those please do tell me. 3 out of the 4 RAM sticks came from PCs I worked on that were headed for destruction I noticed a few were same kind as mine (DDR2 - 533) so I got them, so it would be probably worth checking they are behaving. Now for getting free space, I'm not doing well in this respect these days 80 Gb isn't enough I admit there is another hard drive (My E drive) that I took out of an old PC we owned before it went to meet it's maker which is also 80G but is much slower (it causes mouse lag sometimes) as it is even older than the original dell hard drive, because of its speed I don't want to run commonly run programs off it which take up the bulk of my C drive along with the system files, one annoying thing with wasted space on my C drive is I have a game on there that never belonged to me I installed it to update directx drivers as at that item I was on dial up, anyway the uninstaller refuses to run so I can't get rid of it. As I dont have the CD I can't repair the files with the CD so I was very tempted just to delete the file but I know that would most likely cause more bad than good. One last little point, the reason that I'm dragging out this PC is just over a year i'll be moving to uni and going the laptop route, I hate windows vista so am hoping 7 will be better (I live in hope) Stroby

I have a Dell dimension 5100, it's getting on in years but its been modified quite a lot since it came off the production line, fairly recently (last few months) it has developed a problem where it doesn't start up, it was very very infrequent at first but is slowly becoming far more common. What it does is that you push on power and the first screen comes up which has the dell logo on it and a loading bar and sometimes the bar will load to 2/3 full then just stop, nothing else, no strange noises, no nothing. Always gets to the same point on the bar until just now where it only made it 1/2 way which made me think that the problem was developing. The Dell loading screen usually only takes a few seconds on a normal boot. I understand that my computer is old and really needs replacing soon-ish but I get on with it, so if anyone knows of this problem then please give me some fixing suggestions. Also another point is my hard drive only has 7% free space now but this problem started when I had about 17%, just thought that might be worth mentioning -PC Specs- Windows XP Home - SP3 Dell Dimension 5100 Intel Pentium 4 3GHz RAM - 2560MB Bios - Phoenix

Thanks for that, I did so and it's cleaned up a few massive fragmented files that were unable to be defraged I would appear a major issue with defraggler is in stopping a defrag, it does it too quickly for it's self and makes a mess of many different files some time its very difficult to straighten these files again, it need to be changed so it completes it's current action and then stops, this you may say is annoying as you would push stop and nothing would happen leading to confusion but the button could grey out and text change to "stopping" I'd rather have this than screwed files

This isn't so much of a problem more a query as to why defraggler did what it did After quite a long over due defrag with defraggler there were a few files left over with fragments I repeated the process until only pagefile.sys I know that this file cant be defraged due to its unstable nature but I decided to see what it would do expecting it just to give up but in stead it launched in to a massive defrag and despite pagefile.sys being the only file on the list to be defraged the "Drive C" tab was showing many seemingly random files, from registry keys to small jpegs and just about anything, were being defraged, and at some points on the key I could see fragments appearing being read then written then going, I thought this behavour was a little strange considering it is has been going for over half hour and still only "57%", any ideas what its upto? EDIT I cancelled the defrag and it had created fragmented files varying up to 1.5 GB down to 8 KB and varied types of files from sytem files, registry keys and documents some which haven't been accessed in a long time so i can only assume that defraggler actually did the opposite to its job

lol not quite yet but this the way to pick it up, I look after three machines which each have their own little quirks.

Ok I did all of those things and, and, and one of them worked It works again and it hasn't done that in over 6 months Thank you everyone who contributed to helping me, much appreciated

thought it was going to work there as I do use CCC and I did have it set to custom and also it has fixed one file format ones which are used online by WMP (sorry I couldn't find the extension) which I was just getting a black screen with the sound that one now plays correctly but for mp3s, avi & wmv (possibly more formats) i'm still missing audio

Thanks hazelnut I think that problem is fixed... although I think this thread slightly wondered off the point

unfortunately that's a dead thread and the problem doesn't seem to have been resolved in that case

ok as requested here are the properties of both 1001 and 1004

attached is a screenshot

sorry I made a mistake there the MsiIstaller is showing warnings not errors

In applications I have a lot of errors from "MsiInstaller" In security nothing of interest In system I have a lot of errors from "Service control manager" In ACEEventLog Nothing of interest And internet explorer is blank which isn't a surprise because I use Firefox (yay firefox 3)

No that didn't work, and what event log?

Well it seems I have no broken codecs according to sherlock. I did what you suggested and rolled back to WMP10 (which also didn't work) and then reinstalling WMP11 but it didn't have any effect. I often use other player such as winamp and iTunes these don't fix or display the problems them selves. Interestingly the 6.4 WMP worked but how can I carry this over to WMP 11? I belive this to be my Problem (I receive no error messages) I have followed their steps and still no change. No I haven't yet but I will now