w/ mouse - w/ keyboard = no doomps (2 times) ... huh ? it was doomping before with both of'em. ??
Soooo: I used process explorer to kill some services, and it turns out that a service called "HP Digital Imaging Monitor" aka hpqtra08.exe will cause the doomp every time you shut it off and restart. It is part of a labyrinth of HP software, all interconnected in obscure ways.
I think (suggestions solicited here) the next step is to find out what can safely be removed without crippling the whole system.
I already spent some time trying to track down which exe calls up which other one. Now will use Hazel's suggestion, services.msc, to stop them one at a time and see what happens. Hope the on off button on this box is durable.
By the way, "HP Digital Imaging Monitor" has nothing to do with the monitor, afaik, so I bet the guys who named it are the same ones who called it "Windows XP Ding.wav" instead of doomp, which is what it is.
Yes, what I want do do is get rid of the HP stuff safely. It seems that the problem started before when I deleted some of that, so i am treading lightly right now.
Edit: not thinking today, either. Guess its msconfig, not services.
Brain fried. Too many exes.
How do those spyware specialists do it, reading all those logs without them running together?
Hazel, I have to stop this just now, duties call. Didn't want to leave without saying.
As it stands right now I have used msconfig to stop several startups, and the google updater service, and everything is still working. The doomps are stopped.
Once it is determined what is safe to shut off, I will just uninstall the HP extra stuff that is not needed.
Am I on the right track here?
@ Alan: the serviwin utility is great, as are two others from nirsoft: DriverView and WhatInStartup. Never used them before. Thanks.
Apart from my av/firewall and sandboxie, I don't have anything else running at startup. Everything will still work, but it will work when YOU want it to.
I liken it to the fact that you wouldn't leave the engine running in your car outside all the time just in case you wanted to drive somewhere, no, you start the car when you need to.
It's a personal thing I feel strongly about, I just hate all those programs which decide to make themselves startup when you turn on your computer.
The HP pre-installed software, you can google each one. On one of my laptops (HP) I got rid of HP Total Care Advisor, Help+Support, Update, Customer Experience Enhancement and the Manual without a second thought with no ill effects... but that's me, I didn't feel I needed any of them.
If it's any help Login, I'm running an HP computer (Presario 2006), and this is all I have in my startup courtesy of CCleaner, which actually mirrors the "msconfig startup" tab.
If it wasn't for the 4 user added entries (Erunt, RocketDock etc) there would only be Avast there.
It's surprising how many things run at startup which you really do not need to run. The secret is to disable them only, and then you can always enable them again.
I was 100% sure about the ones I would never enable again, so I deleted them to clean the display up. Yep, just didn't like looking at them.
That is the situation here exactly. Great analogy, the car running, just in case. This computer is already noticeably faster, just from disabling the start-ups for the HP clutter.
After that last reinstallation the extra stuff was all back, of course. I was trying to pick the flyspecks out of the pepper, one exe at a time. Bad idea.
Dennis, your post puts it all into a neat perspective: Disable the start-ups, test the system for a while, uninstall the clutter, run CCleaner: Good idea.
Hazel, I couldn't for the life of me remember to use msconfig. Probably shouldn't admit that, but there it is. Had to google it for pete's sake. Tier one brain cramp.
Am now going to pin taxi fare and a map to my house in a shirt pocket, in case some nice person finds me wandering around in the shopping center.
Am now going to pin taxi fare and a map to my house in a shirt pocket, in case some nice person finds me wandering around in the shopping center.
That sounds like a plan.
Funnily enough the other week I was in town, and for some inexplicable reason I suddenly found my self back home, and for the life of me, I couldn't remember how the hell I got there.
And then I remembered I was wearing a pair of these ...
Thankfully, I was still in the same time continuum!
The a307x is now doomp free. Runs very well actually. I can not thank you all enough for the help.
Hazel, after all was said & done, I just took the safest route I could think of. Re-installed windows from the native restore app and used the native uninstaller for each of those oem HP apps. They're gone now, along with those software offers. You were right to be concerned, something was amiss down in the depths of windows. Not sure what. Never did manage to fix it until re-installing windows.
Alan & Andavari, thanks for the heads up on those apps; they are great, and dangerous.
Dennis, as soon as the updates finish, sometime in August I guess, I shall disable all the unnecessary services.
Kroozer was right also a while back, it took a lot of time, not worth it except as a learning experiment and a thumb in the eye of planned obsolescence.
Of course, with you having a regular Manufacturer XP disk, you know it will always cause more problems than just having a plain XP setup disk due the customizations specific to the machine your installing to, don't you?
Just asking... The impressive thing to me about Ubuntu, is I had a laptop I was doing for someone, & none of the Windows variants I tried would get past bluescreening at some point, because of failing hardware.
But Ubuntu would attempt to install, see the error, & after 2 or 3 tries, it would be up & running, & basically ignoring the errors. No bluescreen, just stable.
I was like, what, what? Windows can't do this? LOL!
