XP mostly unresponsive, why ???

[Chris Shearer Cooper]

I just started having some strange problems with my Windows XP Professional
(Service Pack 2). And to get some of the obvious questions out of the way,
I'm all legal, have automatic updates turned on, and run SpySweeper with
AntiVirus regularly. As a developer, it's not uncommon for me to install &
uninstall various things regularly, so I can't point to one specific thing I
did that "before X, my system worked, and after X, it didn't."

Starting last week, I would come back to my machine after it sat inactive
for a while, wiggle the mouse, and the screen would wake up for me to click
on my username and enter my password. I could move the mouse, the cursor
would follow, but clicking on my username didn't open up the edit box for me
to enter my password. Ctrl-Alt-Del did nothing. The only thing I could do
was hit the Reset button. This didn't happen every time - but maybe about
1/3 of the time.

So I told my screensaver to not require a login, and now this morning I came
back to my computer after it had been inactive, and when I wiggled the mouse
my normal screen appeared - taskbar on the bottom, Start button, icons on
the desktop, the whole shebang, and it was sorta kinda responsive.

For example, if I hovered the mouse over the Task Manager icon in the
taskbar, the bubble popped up showing my CPU usage (13%). BTW, I've got a
dual-core CPU so even if a process had freaked out, I should still have 50%
CPU availability. But if I right-clicked on the Task Manager icon, no popup
menu to let me restore it. Double-clicking on it did nothing. I could
click the mouse on the programs showing up in the taskbar (Outlook and Dev
Studio 2005) and their icons in the taskbar became selected, but the
programs didn't appear. Alt-Tab brought up the dialog that showed my two
active programs, but picking one did nothing, and as I tabbed between them,
the control that normally tells you the name of the program remained blank.
Clicking on the Start button does nothing. No disk activity (no light and I
can hear my drives and they were quiet).

Any suggestions? I'm baffled!

Thanks,
Chris

 

[Spikey]

Starting last week, I would come back to my machine after it sat inactive
for a while, wiggle the mouse, and the screen would wake up for me to
click on my username and enter my password. I could move the mouse, the
cursor would follow, but clicking on my username didn't open up the edit
box for me to enter my password. Ctrl-Alt-Del did nothing. The only
thing I could do was hit the Reset button. This didn't happen every
time - but maybe about 1/3 of the time.

Not enough free drive space?

Also got some weird and wonderful behaviour when my old mb battery needed
replacing and the bios kept going back to factory defaults.

 

[Chris Shearer Cooper]

Hum ... C: disk has 3 GB free, D: disk has 7GB free.

If the BIOS was resetting to defaults, and the defaults weren't right, I
would expect that I would have to change the BIOS settings each time it hung
before it would work again?

 

[Sharon F]

Hum ... C: disk has 3 GB free, D: disk has 7GB free.

If the BIOS was resetting to defaults, and the defaults weren't right, I
would expect that I would have to change the BIOS settings each time it hung
before it would work again?

You want about 15 percent free space on C: (assuming that's where Windows
resides and boots from).

 

[Sharon F]

Hum ... C: disk has 3 GB free, D: disk has 7GB free.

PS : After confirming that there is enough free space, run disk
defragmenter. On an older install of XP and especially one that changes
often (your many installs and uninstalls), the automatic defragging may
need a helping hand to get a thorough job done.

 

[Chris Shearer Cooper]

15% free, no matter what the size of the disk? That seems odd ...

The C: disk is 111 GB total, only 3.44 GB (3%) free. I'll try freeing up
some space, and running the defragmenter.

Thanks.

 

[Rock]

15% free, no matter what the size of the disk? That seems odd ...

The C: disk is 111 GB total, only 3.44 GB (3%) free. I'll try freeing up
some space, and running the defragmenter.

You need 15% free to run the defragmenter.