The Windows/PC support thread

[Jinx]

shoehorn said:

Jinx,you are certainly not living up to your username.
My wife tried your advice this morning and after several shutdowns and reboots it is behaving as it should,top work,Thank you.
Incidentally,how does it get an active desktop in the first place?
I suspect ignorance.

I believe it's part of the "Bing Desktop" update that I never install - you may want to start considering upgrading away from XP soon as it falls out of support next April (so no more security updates). Either it's hands in pocket Win 7 or 8 clean install or put Linux Mint on there for free.

[grumbledoak]

It's a long time ago now, but I thought Active Desktop was an option on XP. It's just Internet Explorer as a backdrop isn't it? You can turn it off.

[CommanderJameson]

Here's a tip if you've got Windows 7 or 8 on a laptop and are looking to extend battery life.

Start an administrative command prompt, type

 powercfg -energy 

Wait a bit for it to do its thing, then read the energy-report.html file that's generated.

[jimed]

I'm not sure if this will help RobbieKB re his earlier post but I had a similar problem last week with my PC (running XP SP3 and IE8). On booting up it went extremely slow after maybe a minute; looking at Task Manager (right click on bar at bottom of screen and then select) I could see that svchost.exe (of which there are often a few running) was using almost 100% of CPU.
I tried a search re this and info suggested that it has been caused by some MS updates which can sometimes cause the PC to constantly search or something which uses all the memory and making it run slowly - this apparently can happen with IE 6,7 as well. The solution was said to be to switch off all MS updates and this certainly stopped the problem. I later read that MS were doing a fix for this in IE but then couldn't see how to get to any update as switching on the update service started the problem going again. Hmm! I then thought that if the update was to IE then a reload of that might come with the fix installed so I went to the MS site and selected download of IE8 - it then told me I already had it so did I want to do it again? - said yes and it then offered me the updates for IE8 as well so downloaded the lot and all is now well with updates turned back on and windows updates (which were waiting but I couldn't get to) all downloaded as normal so hopefully sorted!
Hope that isn't too long winded; I'm not a computer expert but it might help someone else with this problem.
Jim

Edited by jimed on Sunday 15th December 17:25

[fatboy18]

Help. OK not sure where to start,
History
For the last few years I have been using an ACER Aspire laptop, it was at one point running windows Vista but over the years it had issues and I called out a company called PC Doctor to try and repair it, bottom line was time was money, so the engineer ripped out the hard drive and replaced it with windows 7. I don't understand much about anti virus stuff but a mate downloaded a free trial version of AGV which has now expired.
The Acer laptop now takes best part of 15min to fire up after many many reboots, and I can hear a clicking sound which I presume is coming from the replaced hard drive? (NO point contacting the repair company as they charge a fortune and just want to sell you more stuff).

Now having got really fed up with trying to get the Acer to work, I took the plunge and have just bought a replacement laptop.

I went to currys and bought a HP Pavilion which has a 1TB Hard Drive, 8192MB DDR SDRAM running a Core i.5 processor. Quite frankly I had no idea what I was buying and the so called sales reps were fking usless.

Then they tell you, you need x, y and z to run the bloody thing. They wanted me to leave the laptop with them for a day and charge me for setting it up. No way was I going back to bloody Croydon to pick it up so I am attempting to set the thing up myself! Now we all have skills in different areas, and to be honest there are so many things that the people who write the instructions 'presume and expect you to know'

Now I must have done something right because I'm on the new laptop typing this post!

But I'm stuck trying to work out how to set up my emails? I was using outlook express but I don't know how to set it up on this new computer, there is now loads of other stuff I just don't know about, G mail? Twitter? Facebook? Bing? WTF! I guess what I'm trying to ask is, is there anyone out there that can explain to me ( or teach me the new ways of the Windows 8 system)?

I can rebuild my car and motorbikes but when it comes to this new technology sorry to say it scares the life out of me because I don't want to press the wrong button and fk everything up

Is there an Idiots guide out there?

[fatboy18]

Also cant work out how to open up additional windows like you could on 7 and vista

[Jinx]

Go to Classic Shell - download and install (it's free). Set it to look like Win 7 and boot to desktop.

and Robert is your mother's brother

[Petrolhead95]

Why is my laptop running so slow?!

I've done a speed test and it came out at Ping 7 ms, 31 mbps download speed and 1.99 mbps upload speed. My laptop is only 3 months old, I've run scans, have no viruses etc, have Avast internet security and I have no pending updates. It's so slow that I can't watch videos (I need that for work), can barely load webpages and just general slowness online.

I'm not really a computer guy so I'm completely stumped as to why it's so slow. Can anyone suggest something that it could be?

[grumbledoak]

First, run Task Manager (right click the TaskBar) and see how much CPU is being used and by what.

[Petrolhead95]

grumbledoak said:

First, run Task Manager (right click the TaskBar) and see how much CPU is being used and by what.

I'm on 1% at the moment, but earlier it was so slow I couldn't even load Task Manager. It goes through stages of being really unresponsive, normally when I'm trying to work.

[grumbledoak]

Not much to go on. I would guess at Avast.

Can you uninstall it to check if everything speeds up? If not you'll have to reinstall it, of course. And if it is you can download Microsoft Security Essentials instead (it's free and pretty good).

[FiF]

When it's really slow is there a lot of drive activity? Wonder if a change of virus scan schedule or adjustment of the processor priority of scan / updates vs working tasks if that's possible.

[Petrolhead95]

I've found the source of the problem! The laptop came with McAffee or something like that and it kept running this scan at a whopping 80% CPU, that's now gone and my laptop runs fine. Cheers Grumble!

[chimster]

Hope someone can help. My Dad has a 10 year old Dell Dimension 2400 with a Standard VGA Graphics adaptor and an Intel 845 Graphics chip. As it initially had XP, now not supported I removed that and moved to Win 7. All is fine and the computer works quickly and is no problem to use other than the fact that I cannot change the screen resolution. It is on 640 x 480 which is too big for the screen and it gives me no option to adjust it to 1280 x 1024 which is what I understand the native resolution is for the lcd monitor. I did manage to find a way to move to 1280 x 1024 eventually but then I lost all the colour and focus definition. I have tried to update the drivers but they appear to be up to date and the service tag for the computer doesn't work on Dell's website. Could someone please advise as to what my best course of action might be to rectify the problem. Cheers Phil

[LordGrover]

You should be able to download video drivers from dell support. Just enter tag number and it'll list appropriate drivers.

[chimster]

Thanks, it won't accept my tag but I can use the the model number instead. One more question please is the screen resolution issue related to the Graphics Adaptor or Graphics Chip, as I want to update the right piece of hardware. Cheers

[LordGrover]

The chip is a component of the card/adaptor. It's drivers for the adaptor (as a whole) you're looking for.

ETA. Though the chip may help identify which adaptor.

Edited by LordGrover on Tuesday 17th June 11:07

[chimster]

Many thanks I will crack on with that. Cheers

[chimster]

Sorry one more question. When I go into Control Panel/Device Manager/Display Adaptors it tells me I have a 'Standard VGA Graphics Adaptor' Shouldn't it be a more precise description of the adaptor than that, sounds a bit generic to me or is that normal. Cheers

[LordGrover]

Yep, it's the generic, one size fits all, if an exact matching driver is unavailable. Probably this is the one you're looking for: click. May or may not work with Win7 - it's a very old computer/graphics adaptor.