I was checking my "tv" PC (the one with ongoing problems, and not so good motherboard from Bxxxxxxp).
Since Cyberlink had asked me to increase the PCs virtual memory, uninstall any other video display/record software, and reinstall powercinema, I decided to do some maintenance (The PC seemed a bit slower than usual)
Thats when I noticed that viewing the contents of c:\documents and settings\{user}\local settings\temp seemed to freeze windows explorer.
But other instances of explorer worked well until I tried to view the temp folder...
I restarted the PC, used explorer and clicked on the temp folder, then left the PC, and came back about 30 minutes later.
At that point, I could see that there were over 150,000 files in the temp folder... no wonder it took so long to display the contents
The main culprit was files named from audiotem1 to audiotem150956.
Ok, highlight all the audiotem files (which took another 10 minutes), and then delete (another 15 minutes).
Once that was done, I could finally clear the remaining files in the temp folder, and do a defrag.
I'm still not sure what caused this problem, but over the next few days, it didn't seem to return.
The only unusual thing that happens on this PC, is that the 40GB hard drive sometimes fills up with video files (the cyberlink powercinema software seems to get confused and sometimes doesn't know when to start (or stop) recording 
Posted by Computer Help as Technical at 1:49 PM CST
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Customer had a corrupt registry with his PC.
I fixed it, but I did notice that the air coming out the rear exhaust fan was very warm (warmer than the air coming out the power supply just above).
I take a quick look, and I see its a pentium D 805 (2.66 Mhz)
I use my fingers, and notice that the CPU heatsink is quite hot. I also notice the motherboard northbridge heatsink, seagate hard drive, 2 sticks of ddr2 533mhz ram (with heat spreader), are all very warm...
The cpu heatsink is a standard intel heatsink/fan, and seems to be running at full speed most of the time. I made sure the heatsink is free of dust buildup, and I check that the heatsink is making good contact with the CPU.
There is a lot of heat inside this box, so its not too surprising that things are starting to fail.
I ran some heat monitor programs (speedfan and sensorsview) and the cpu temp was 70c at idle !!!
I ran 2 copies of "cpu burn in" (one per core), and the temperature climbed to 84c
Remove the side case panel, and the cpu temperature dropped to 74c
I then went into the bios, and underclocked the cpu (changed bus speed from 133 mhz to 100mhz)... so the cpu dropped from 2.66 mhz to 2.0 mhz.
Repeating the tests, I found that without the side panel, the temp dropped to 71c (and all the other components were still quite warm to touch). At idle, the CPU was 65c.
In summary: not good... The system life is going to be short.
Customer agrees, and we look at upgrading to a reasonable core2 duo system.
Posted by Computer Help as Technical at 1:35 PM CST
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Customer thinks she has an instant messenger virus (her IM friends complain that she is sending them virus laden messages).
When I arrive, the PC is doing some strange things: Trend is currently scanning the PC (so I let it complete), but I also notice an avg icon on the desktop, as well as a few antispyware icons...
I assume that trend will do a good job (not a good assumption, but I have a "minimum impact" philosophy, so I won't remove trend unless I have to).
The taskbar shows the quicklaunch, the start button, and the notification area, but it doesn't show the running windows. This is annoying... as soon as I minimise a window, I need to use task manager to get it back...
Anyway, trend finds 6 infected files, but can only fix 5 of them. It says to resolve the issue, click on a particular link... and the link takes me to a help window, which tells me to disable certain services, and do a few other odd tasks. but they don't fix a thing.
Since some of the trend windows have an "upgrade now" icon, I suspect that this is not the full trend security (or it has expired). Anyway, I gave trend its chance, and it didn't work, So I uninstall it (as well as avg and any other antispyware software I'm not sure about), and I install antivir, spywareblaster, bhodemon, and winpatrol.
Antivir (once updated from the net), immediately detects some problem files... Just to be sure, I decide to run a scan from safe mode, and it detected many files (and the vundo trojan). While it was scanning, I disabled anything bad from starting in the registry, and told antivir to delete any "non removable files" when the PC restarted.
Since the scan was taking a very long time, I decided (after 3 hours) to leave, and ask the customer to allow the scan to complete, and then restart the PC, and then let me know if there are any further problems.
In the end, even after a scan from antivir, there were still 2 infected (or possibly re-infected) files...
I returned, removed the files by booting ubcd4win, removing the guilty dll files, and then no more infections were found...
However, the problem about minimised windows disappearing remained.
At this point, I decided a repair install of windows was the only option left...
So I did a repair install, updated to SP2, run autopatcher, get all the latest patches... but I still cannot see minimised windows!
I really don't want to do a clean install, so I do a careful search on the net, and turn up a brilliant little utility called TaskBar Repair Tool Plus!
With TBRTP, I quickly had the application buttons visible again.
Posted by Computer Help as Technical at 1:02 PM CST
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"Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM"
Now thats a message that strikes fear into the hearts of many non-technical users.
It's rare, but I recently saw 2 systems with this error (just a few days apart).
I can usually fix this using bartPE (or ubcd4win)... I'll detail how to do it later on.
In this case, bartPE and ubcd4win also wouln't start (either they would hang, or I'd get a BSOD).
I tried memtest, but found no fault
So I opened up the PC, and eventually fixed the startup problem by moving the RAM to another socket... why didn't memtest pickup any fault? who knows.
Anyway, to fix the corrupt XP registry hive:
- I start ubcd4win
- Backup the contents of windows\system32\config folder
- Assuming that system restore hasn't been switched off: I look for the contents of "system volume information\_restore{lots of characters}\RPXXX\snapshot
- You might need to alter the security settings of "system volume information" so that you can access it.
- There are many RPXXX folders, so just pick one that has a date just before the "crash" occurred.
- Copy all the files (from RPXXX) that start with "_REGISTRY_" to windows\system32\config
- Rename the files that end in "default", "security", "software", "system", "sam" to default, security, software, system, sam. You probably need to delete the original default, security, etc files first.
- Restart the PC
- You might need to "restore last known good configuration" or XP might perform a disk check
- Breath a sigh of relief.
Posted by Computer Help as Technical at 1:48 PM CST
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I've always wondered if a hard drive can make much difference to the speed of a system.
My suspicion is that newer HDDs have a larger cache, and can "slurp" up more data in 1 disk rotation, than older ones.
I recently had a chance to test out my theory.
I had 2 very different hard drives and systems:
- HDD: 4.0 Gb quantum fireball CR
- HDD: 250 GB Seagate st3250820A
- System: Pentium D 2.66Ghz, 2GB RAM
- System: Pentium 3 550Mhz, 256Mb RAM
Now, I can't say this is a totally scientific test, I just wanted to test an assumption that I had.
With each hard drive, I'd place it into a system, repartition the hard drive, then do a fresh install of windows XP SP2.
Once XP was installed, I would update all the device drivers.
I would not defragment, install any antimalware, or anything else that might alter the results. The reason is that I would have a system that many average users would find "out of the box".
I would then time the startup, from when the windows logo first appears, until the start button first appears.
I would then restart the system twice, so that I would have 3 bootup times for each configuration.
The results:
Pentium D system:
4GB HDD: 33.9 sec, 27.3 sec, 32.9 sec
250GB HDD: 24.1 sec, 24.0 sec, 24.0 sec
P3 system:
4GB HDD: 26.0 sec, 25.6 sec, 26.3 sec
250GB HDD: 25.3 sec, 24.4 sec, 25.1 sec
It looks like the timespan I was measuring might have included many points when XP might have been waiting for timeout conditions, as there doesn't seem to be much difference between the HDDs (the biggest difference (about 3 - 9 seconds) was with the pentium D system... but surprisingly, the P3 system seemed to beat it while using the 4GB drive... curious.
I'm not sure if I can make any real conclusions about all this... as I also have 2 virtually identical HP systems (one with a 6GB HDD, and the other with a 20GB HDD)... and I could swear that the 20GB system feels faster to me... maybe my mind is playing tricks on me.
Posted by Computer Help as Technical at 1:34 PM CST
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A customer cannot start up his PC:
Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \windows\system32\config\system
I start bartPE, and the windows\system32\config folder seems empty. Normally only 1 or 2 files are corrupt, but I find that the whole folder is empty.
I get the needed files from system volume information, but I get an error when trying to copy them to the config folder.
I just rename the folder, and create a new config folder, then copy the files (and rename them appropriately).
After that, windows restarts without the corrupt error, but a scandisk springs into action during the startup.
After the startup, I see the missing files in the renamed config folder have suddenly reappeared.
So it looks like the config folder was corrupt, so windows couldn't start up to run a scandisk...
Is it just me, or is there something wrong with this scenario?
I would have thought that a scandisk should be able to operate virtually stand-alone, without needing the registry hives. After all, they get written fairly often, so they are prime candidates for corruption...
Thinking back to my unix admin days, I remember unix would first start a very basic shell, and run a dskchk if it was needed, before the unix kernel itself was loaded. The basic shell, chkdsk, the kernel loader (and a few other tools) would almost never need to be altered, so they were highly unlikely to become corrupt.
I wonder if vista is any better? (I suspect not!)
Posted by Computer Help as Technical at 1:54 PM CST
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Had a customer who would have her internet access just stop working unexpectedly.
When I was first called, I tracked it down to just a lost adsl password... call bigpond, get the password reset, and then it worked fine (or so I thought).
About a week later it seemed to happen again... this time, the adsl modem settings seemed correct (no one had gone into the speedtouch 530 configuration settings, so the password (the sequence of dots) was still there.
But when the modem was (re) started, the lights came up correctly, except for the "@" light... instead of being a solid green, it would be a solid yellow colour.
To me, that indicates that the speedtouch can detect an adsl line connection, but cannot get authorised to actually use the internet (ie wrong username or password).
So I call bigpond technical help (to ask if there is a line fault), and while waiting on hold, I decide to re-enter the password again (hey, it can't hurt!).
Once I enter the password, the modem connects!
OK: hangup the phone... there is no line fault.
I try google, and it works... hmmm, whats going on here?
I restart the modem, and I wait a few minutes, but it just never reconnects on it own.
The speedtouch 530 configuration screen show that it is meant to save the password, and it looks like it has remembered a password, but it won't connect (and it doesn't indicate that it had an authentication failure either!!!) until I re-enter the password manually.
I take a new netgear modem out of the car, connect it up, and it has no problem "remembering" the password.
I guess the NVRAM in the speedtouch 530 was flaky.
The customer recalls that her hubby (who is currently away on business) would often need to do some work to "fix the internet", but he wouldn't believe that the modem was faulty because "then never break down".
Well, it is rare, but modems (and RAM, CPUs, ethernet cards, etc) can break down.
Posted by Computer Help as Technical at 5:20 PM CST
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Customer dropped off her PC, saying it will suddenly shutdown, and then has problems starting again. And when it did run, it was very slow
She was really worried about losing her MYOB accounting data. So the first thing I did was to backup her data... the hard drive seemed to work perfectly...
I put the HDD back into her PC, and the PC started perfectly.
I ran it for 2 hours (I intermittently did some tuning, ms updates, spyware scans (found 2 nasties), and also gave the PC a clean (lots of dust inside).
After 2 hours (about 20 seconds after I finished removing the spyware), the PC suddenly stopped. I was about to say I couldn't find any fault...
I had the PC open at that point, so I looked around (and touched a few heatsinks, video cards, etc)... and I noticed the PSU was very warm. Not hot, but close.
After that, the PC wouldn't start.
OK, I try a new power supply, and the PC starts correctly.
I run a few more tests, and everything is fine.
After about 20 minutes, I notice that the (unplugged from the mains) failed power supply was still warmer that the new power supply (that had been running for the last 20 minutes)... I'm not sure what went wrong with the PSU, but I was strange.
Anyway, I ran the PC for about 4 hours (thats how long it took to defragment!!!), and it didn't fail.
After that, it was ready to be returned to its owner.
Posted by Computer Help as Technical at 1:14 PM CST
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I don't see many mdt (magnetic data technologies) hard drives, but with the few that I do see, its usually to recover data.
This particular one gave some very obvious signs: when the PC started, the bios POST warned dire consequences due to the SMART monitoring of the hard drive.
Continuing from that lead to windows XP taking a very long time to start. In fact, after 5 minutes, it still hadn't started, so I decided to pull the plug and take the PC back to the office.
I sometimes dread doing data recovery, as it can sometimes mean complete data loss. And I have yet to find a customer that is prepared to pay $600 - $3000 to recover their digital photos (or even their accounting files!).
I was hoping this wouldn't be a battle lasting many hours, while shuttling between the PC and the freezer.
Anyway, it all looked promising. I could easily read a few random files when I connected the drive to the office pc.
I decided to try a clone onto a 40GB hard drive... and the cloning process worked perfectly.
After that, I spent some time updating the XP (SP2, autopatcher, ms updates, antivir, defender, winpatrol, spyware blaster, defrag), then the PC was ready to go back to its owner
Posted by Computer Help as Technical at 1:30 PM CST
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