Q. I have a year-old HP Pavilion 540n with a Pentium 4, 256 megabytes of RAM, 40-gigabyte Maxtor hard drive, Windows XP Home with Service Pack 1, current drivers, current Microsoft patches, except the recent and problematic 811493, up-to-date McAfee VirusScan Online and Kerio Personal Firewall. The machine has run flawlessly, although it always stuttered a bit at bootup. Now, occasionally, the green bar stutters and stops, and the computer freezes. I do regular maintenance, the hard drive is 75 percent free, and the registry is free of bad entries. I have performed several system restores, as well as a nondestructive system recovery, with no effect. I'm out of ideas.
A. First, you did an excellent job of defining your system. It makes focusing on possible solutions much easier when all of these variables are answered.
I would first look in the System Event log. This is often overlooked by most former Windows 9x users and even veteran Windows NT/2000/XP users. Significant events are logged here and often provide a lot of good information. Access the Event viewer from Contro Panel, Administrative Tools, Event Viewer. Check for any hardware inconsistency or problem.
If everything checks out here, do a logged boot. Do this by restarting the computer and pressing F8 when prompted. On the Windows Advanced Options menu, select Enable Boot Logging. Windows XP records in the log C:\Windows\Ntbtlog.txt the name and path of each file that runs during startup. The log marks each file as successful (Loaded driver) or unsuccessful (Did not load driver). If the booting completes, save a copy of this file for later comparison. If the boot does not complete (the computer freezes), reboot normally until it succeeds and save the boot log from the unsuccessful attempt. Boot again with the logging option on until you get a successful boot, then compare the two logs. The unsuccessful boot log should end with the last device it tried to activate.
It is possible the system call to the devices firmware routine is having problems, which may be caused by either corrupted drivers or hardware. You can selectively disable different hardware devices through Device Manager (Control Panel, System, Hardware tab, click the Device Manager button) by right-clicking the device and selecting Disable. Finally, I would also try turning off the ACPI features (advanced power management) of your BIOS (check your motherboard documentation) and see if that makes a difference.
Taskbar notification
Q. I downloaded a critical update for Windows, and I lost my Notifier, the small envelope that sits on bottom blue bar. I have tried to find it to no avail.
A. Try this: Right-click on any free area of your Taskbar and select Properties. Then click the Customize button. Scroll down until you see the "You have new e-mail" line. Click the drop-down option to the right of this entry and make sure it is set to "Always Show" or "Hide when inactive." Click the OK buttons to back out of the Properties windows.
Peerless peeve
Q. On my laptop, I sometimes have problems copying large amounts of data, such as the contents of My Documents, onto a Peerless 20-gigabyte backup external drive or even to my internal CD-RW drive. The "Copying in Progress" screen never stops, even if I leave it for hours. I can't stop it either. The Task Manager will not stop the process; I can't shut down the machine because Windows says a program is still running. I have to do a forced power down, without closing Windows. I use Windows XP Home (including Service Pack 1 and all critical updates). Strangely enough, rebooting after a forced power down, I find that the files have been copied successfully. What is the problem?
A. Check Iomega's Web site to make sure you have the latest version of drivers or firmware for your Peerless drive. Other than that, I would suspect power management is interfering with the device communication. Try disabling the PC's power management (Control Panel, Power Options) by setting the Power Schemes to "Always On."
