Re-examine hardware???

[Dale Walker]

On old Win9x OS's it used to be possible to persuade some bits of
hardware (or magically get some other seemingly unrelated software
problem) to work by re-examining all the hardware connections by using
the "add new hardware" icon in the control panel. The XP version does
not seem to add new hardware in the same way.

I've just been battling with my PC to try and work out why it suddenly
and for no apparent reason started taking upwards of 30 mins to reboot
(with no bad entries in the event logs).

So, after several hours of pulling my hair out with system restores,
software reinstalls, event log searching, dropping processes, etc, I
resorted to my age old 'if all else fails' routine...

1. Shut Down PC
2. Open up PC
3. Pull out any card from it's slot
4. Boot up
5. Shut down
6. Replace card
7. Boot up

And did so in this case with good results.

No idea why but I know from experience that this little trick often
gets things working when there's a problem that has no obvious cause.

I suspect doing this forces XP to forget all it's previous
PCI/IRQ/DMA/etc settings and work out new ones.

Anyway, what I'm trying to find is some way of somehow doing this in
software.

 

[danish]

you could try uninstalling and installing drivers. are
you sure you didn't install anything new, specially
drivers before this problem started?

 

[Dale Walker]

you could try uninstalling and installing drivers.

Ah, yes, that may work when the problem starts when just installing
something but what when no recent changes have been made to hardware
and nothing appears to be faulty in either the device, system or event
logs?

are
you sure you didn't install anything new, specially
drivers before this problem started?

Definitely sure.

Only change in the last week was an antivirus definition update.