computer will not shut down

[MARY FEAGAN]

I have a Dell laptop runing XP and up until a few days ago, it worked
perfectly. However, I am now having trouble with both opening up and
shutting down. It takes ages to open up and when it does, I cannot get into
start or log in. At the same time, it will not shut down. Yesterday, it
did eventually shut down after about 5 hours. Could the disc drive be
damaged.

As a complete novice with computers, any help you can give would be much
appreciated.

thanks

Mary

 

[DatabaseBen]

could be that your pagefile/virtual memory got set to none. This happens to
me on occassion and i set it back to manual for a min=2 and max 1399.

Sometimes hardware becomes a problem for windows enabling/starting them and
shutting them down too. This happens to me on occassion because of the
network/broadband device.

But sometimes it's not the physical network driver, but an internet program
that wants to launch at startup and interferes with windows processess for
starting and shutting down. Run msconfig from the start, run method and
take a look at your startups. Disable anything that doesn't need to be
preloaded by windows and utilize valuable memory space.

Also, could be your registry is gigantic and requires some maintenance.
Look for a freedownload called NTregOpt from ??? and PageDfg from
http:\\sysinternals.com

And yes, your harddrive may be on the blink. Run cleanmgr from the start,
run method. And do your partition defragmentation as well.

 

[Homer S.]

I have a Dell laptop runing XP and up until a few days ago, it worked
perfectly. However, I am now having trouble with both opening up and
shutting down. It takes ages to open up and when it does, I cannot get into
start or log in. At the same time, it will not shut down. Yesterday, it
did eventually shut down after about 5 hours. Could the disc drive be
damaged.

As a complete novice with computers, any help you can give would be much
appreciated.

thanks

Mary

Can you get it to boot into 'Safe Mode'? (Turn computer on - just before
it display's the first Windows Screen, tap the F8 key - on the menu
select 'Safe Mode'). If so, while running in safe mode, do a 'System
Restore' to the day before your problems started - click Start -
highlight All Programs - Accessories - System Tools then click 'System
Restore'. Follow the instructions to restore your system to an earlier
date - the day before the problem started. Good luck.

HJS