Jamie said:
Hi Folks,
My XP is feeling poorly. My midi stopped playing. It can't create
restore points.
So I created an XP SP3 slipstream disc, backed up my C drive. And ran
an Install[Upgrade] thinking that would fix things for me.
Well after the install, the midi was working (heard the windows
booting tune) but when I tried to log into one of my accounts it told
me it needed to be activated. When I clicked on activate now, it made
the "error" noise and nothing came up to activate it. I couldn't find
any way around this. So spent 6+ hours restoring my C drive from
the back up.
Is there any way to repair my XP without having to re-activate it?
I saw some other online directions that talk about booting the
install cd, selecting install XP, accept license agreement, then it
will find the existing installation and I can press R to repair it ..
but is that basically the same thing I already did?
Appreciate some advice...
Repair Installs only work in certain circumstances. But if you have a
bad case of malware infestation, then a Repair Install won't help you.
Instead, how about giving us details about your PC's problems?
System Restore issues are usually easy to address since there are
programs that interfere with it. For more info:
http://bertk.mvps.org/html/srfail.html
Playing midi files should be easy to fix. It's probably a matter of
associating the correct program to play them. If you right-click a midi
file and choose Open With..., you should get a choice of players. (Or
you may need to browse to find one.)
"XP is feeling poorly" doesn't tell us anything; you really need to
supply more information! Like the following:
size of hard drive and amount of free space
amount of RAM
malware status of PC
And here are the typical causes of sluggishness:
1. Malicious software (malware). You need to rule this out first! This
page has excellent information:
http://www.elephantboycomputers.com/page2.html#Viruses_Malware
2. Certain programs that are designed to combat malware (e.g., Norton
and McAfee). Ironically, they can slow things down because they simply
use way too many resources. Sometime they cause conflicts with other
programs. And their default mode is to scan your entire hard drive each
time you boot up. Fortunately, there are other antimalware programs
available that use far fewer resources (e.g., NOD32, Avast, and Avira).
3. Too many of certain types of programs always running in the
background -- with or without your knowledge. (Then again, many programs
that run in the background have trivial consequences.)
To determine every program and process you are currently running, use
the Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del) and click the Processes tab. You should
be able to sort by CPU usage or Memory usage to get a good ideas which
ones are the resource/memory hogs. You should write down the names of
all the processes for future detective work (or take a snapshot and
print it out).
Use these sites to determine what these programs are and to learn how to
configure them not to always run at startup:
http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_content.php#THE_PROGRAMS
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/startups/
http://www.answersthatwork.com/Tasklist_pages/tasklist.htm
Sometimes it is recommended to use msconfig to configure the programs to
not run at startup. A better, more thorough program is Autoruns:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx
But before you do this, you should use the preference settings of the
program in question. Otherwise, for some programs, they will return to
the startup list anyway!
If you do wish to use msconfig, it may be accessed this way:
Start | Run | type "msconfig" (without the quotation marks) | Enter (or
OK)
4. Not enough RAM, which causes the PC to overly rely on the pagefile. A
quick way to determine if this is happening is to open Task Manager
(Ctrl+Alt+Del) and click the Performance tab. Then note the three values
under Commit Charge (K): in the lower left-hand corner: Total, Limit,
and Peak.
The Total figure represents the amount of memory you are using at that
very moment. The Peak figure represents the highest amount of memory you
used since last bootup. If both these figures are below the value of
Physical Memory (K) Total, then you probably have plenty of RAM.
In case you want to explore this further, you may run Page File Monitor
for Windows XP:
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_pagefilemon.htm
5. You might also want to check that your hard drive's access mode
didn't change from DMA to PIO:
http://www.technize.com/2007/08/02/is-your-hard-disk-cddvd-drives-too-slow-while-copying/
and
http://users.bigpond.net.au/ninjaduck/itserviceduck/udma_fix/