Hi good people,
a few weeks ago I sent you info about a computer problem I was having and several of you took the trouble to make many suggestions for which I thank you. I tried some of them but they didn't work in my particular case – not because they were not good suggestions but more because a computer is too complicated and the root cause may not have been where you or I thought it was - and I didn't have the spare time to implement some other ideas –which I thought might take a long time to do because I would be in unfamiliar territory. The computer worked okay so long as I shutdown with the power button, so the original problem was inconvenient rather than critical. I persevered with the situation, knowing that sometime soon I would be able to devote quite a few hours to solving the problem.
Meanwhile, I kept on with my regular Norton Systemworks Optimiser every week or so (their version of Defragmenter, but it takes much longer and may be more thorough.. who knows? I know some of you don’t like Nortons for various reasons, but my machine has run better since I have had it, and I paid out for a year’s worth including antivirus protection, so for now I will keep using it. For me, the resource thing is not an issue.)
Then... the problem of having the shutdown failure just disappeared!
The STOP 0x8...etc error messages I got when shutting down were apparently driver related. Maybe the prob had been due to a driver file becoming fragmented? Is that possible? Could a driver file have fragments removed from it and thus become unusable? If so, then perhaps lots of defragging may do the trick to solve this type of problem for others, even using XP’s defrag tool, which may work just as well. I wonder if Norton’s Optimiser put the fragments in their rightful places. Either way, the problem was gone.
And the Standby icon on the shutdown popup screen was no longer dull and faded in color. It was back in full color and usable. But I now had the problem that the Computer would only go on standby for a minute or so. I googled for that new problem and came up with this webpage which had some useful advice:
www.aumha.org/win5/a/shtdwnxp.htm
So I had a look at Control Panel>System>Hardware>Devicemanager and then leftclicked on the + sign for modems. When that opened, I highlighted it then rightclicked and opened Properties for the modem. A new pop-up appeared which had a power management tab. I clicked on that and there before my eyes was a ticked box with the words next to it : “allow this device to bring your computer out of standby”. I clicked that to remove the tick and guess what happened? The modem cannot bring the computer out of standby. I also opened the properties for every device and checked for power management also. All clear...Now my computer is 100% back to normal and will stay on standby and shutdown properly. Big smiles all round!!
Something else I found out about from some document that came with a games CDRom I bought for my daughter: in Start>Run, type dxdiag.exe and click ok. This brings up a really useful tool that I had not heard of before. It is part of Direct X, and tells you heaps about your hardware and software, including many tests to check your drivers and lots of other stuff that I don’t understand. By way of interest I googled it and they has 312000 results. Seems to be useful for gaming, a lot of which uses Direct X. It seems that there is a trojan called Feardoor which uses the same file name, so users would have to be careful they only download it from a reputable source. Be cautious... I also searched in your own site for it but found only one mention, back in 2004….. Odd that…. I would have thought you’d be recommending it more often to help posters diagnose some of their gaming problems.
Anyway, there you go….. three things that may help others to sort out related problems:
defragging to repair non-working drivers
Device manager to check your modem re standby
Dxdiag.exe as a useful tool
Best wishes for your festive season and New Year celebrations!
