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Solutions: Network card could supply 'sleep' answers

By JOHN TORRO
Published October 30, 2006


I cannot get my PC, a Dell 4400, to stay asleep in the 'sleep' settings. I have gone through the power settings, resaved to a new name, applied the settings, and then it will 'sleep' on command for about 45 minutes, but then wakes up. I have shut down the modem and anything else that is drawing any power, and it still won't stay asleep. Any suggestions?

Check your network card. Through Control Panel, Network Connections, right-click your Network and select Properties. Click the Configure button for the network card, and under Properties, check to see if there is a "Power Save Mode." If so, set it to enable - allowing the system to power down the network card while in sleep mode and prevent an awakening from some sort of network activity or a Ping.

We have an older Satellite Pro 430CDT that we believe needs to have the operating system restored. We believe something that stops it from booting up was removed. Any suggestions on how to kick it off from turn on would be appreciated.

I'll assume you have an older version of Windows Me/9x. If there is a missing or corrupted file preventing the system from booting, your best strategy would be to reload the operating system from a source CD. This will keep all your programs and data intact. If the current BIOS is set up to boot first from CD-ROM, booting up with a Windows bootable source CD should get it rolling. Otherwise, you should be able to enter the BIOS setup at power-on to change the setting. An alternative to modifying the boot sequence within the BIOS would be to get a startup boot floppy make from another system by downloading the appropriate version from www.bootdisk.com and then manually running the setup from the Windows source CD.

My son has an unused program on the computer: Risk Your Life version 1.2.2.0. It is quite large (218 MB). We have very little disk space left and I'm trying to delete whatever I can. I cannot, for some reason, delete this. I get this error message: ">setupDLL(439)..." Any suggestions on how to delete this? Also, any suggestions on how we can increase our disk space? We have a Dell Dimension 8200.

What this means is that the DLL used for setup/uninstall is missing. Sometimes reinstalling the program will put it back, and then it can be uninstalled properly. Otherwise, you will need to resort to a manual uninstallation, which means you will need to determine in which directory the program resides and then delete it through Windows File Explorer. I can't tell you what other files to delete to make room on your system without first seeing what is there, but a good place to start is the Disk Cleanup Wizard. Open My Computer and right-click the C Drive, then select Properties. On the General tab, click the Disk Cleanup button. This will launch the wizard. It will first examine your disk to see how much can be recovered. Nothing happens until you confirm it. You will also be given the option of selecting some additional space-saving measures such as compressing older files (assuming that your file system is NTFS).

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