Good evening gentlemen. I am having some seriously weird issues with my PC and I need some advise on how to correct it or at least diagnose the problem(s).
First up some specs. The machine is nearly seven years old. A Dell Dimension E310. 2.8Ghz Intel Pentium 4, 1Gb Ram, 500Gb Western Digital Caviar(green version)hdd, Windows XP Media Centre Edition 2002 SP3. To be completely honest this has been one of the most trouble free computers I have ever been around. XP has been really solid and updates go well. Now as for the hdd, it is new. About six months old. The original was starting to make noises so it went into storage mode so I could move files and the 500Gb model became the main boot drive. Dell makes the installation pretty easy. The mobo has the sense to realise you are installing the factory OS so no big issues there.
The real problem is not coming out of standby correctly. I have the machine set to turn off the monitor after fifteen minutes idle time and the hdd to idle down five minutes later. It is NOT set to go into hibernation. Too many issues on my old 98 machine. I was not going to risk it. In fact, I actually have it set to never shut down. This has always worked a treat. Just roll the mouse, the machine rumbles to life, and off you go. Until recently.
Many times the machine will not rouse itself from standby even though the monitor indicator turns green from orange. It just gives a blinking cursor and eventually you have to just unplug the machine from the mains electricity and cold start it. Most certainly this is not a good way to do things. There is one issue I am not sure is related to this but may be. A few weeks ago I "installed" Linux Mint 11 on this machine. It was done under some sort of installer that allows me to go to Add/Remove Programs and delete it. If you restart the machine it goes to a boot menu and you have the choice of Windoze or LM. This worked quite well but over the last two weeks or so the standby issue has gotten worse. And troubling is that even from a cold start many times you get a black screen that says the hard drive is either non-existent or had a fatal error. Strike F1 to try again or F2 to enter boot menu. Yet if you unplug the machine for ten minutes or so and then reconnect it, it will usually go to the boot menu and let you start normally from either OS. If I wait for say, only a minute, I will usually get the same error. Strange stuff indeed.
I suspect a boot or registry error or some such. I am not a pc savvy technician. I can boot easily to the BIOS so all seems well there. Could this be related to the system battery that keeps your time and BIOS settings? Also, today, for the first time, there was some sort of BSOD thing on the screen when I rolled the mouse with a full page of white text mentioning the pc was not shut down properly and the hard drive may be fatal and all that sort of thing. I had thought about deleting the 30GB install partition of LM, using CCleaner to thoroughly clean up temp files, browser cache, and registry items and then doing a complete malware and virus scan and of course a restart. So can you guys help me? This is irritating.
Regards, Todd
First up some specs. The machine is nearly seven years old. A Dell Dimension E310. 2.8Ghz Intel Pentium 4, 1Gb Ram, 500Gb Western Digital Caviar(green version)hdd, Windows XP Media Centre Edition 2002 SP3. To be completely honest this has been one of the most trouble free computers I have ever been around. XP has been really solid and updates go well. Now as for the hdd, it is new. About six months old. The original was starting to make noises so it went into storage mode so I could move files and the 500Gb model became the main boot drive. Dell makes the installation pretty easy. The mobo has the sense to realise you are installing the factory OS so no big issues there.
The real problem is not coming out of standby correctly. I have the machine set to turn off the monitor after fifteen minutes idle time and the hdd to idle down five minutes later. It is NOT set to go into hibernation. Too many issues on my old 98 machine. I was not going to risk it. In fact, I actually have it set to never shut down. This has always worked a treat. Just roll the mouse, the machine rumbles to life, and off you go. Until recently.
Many times the machine will not rouse itself from standby even though the monitor indicator turns green from orange. It just gives a blinking cursor and eventually you have to just unplug the machine from the mains electricity and cold start it. Most certainly this is not a good way to do things. There is one issue I am not sure is related to this but may be. A few weeks ago I "installed" Linux Mint 11 on this machine. It was done under some sort of installer that allows me to go to Add/Remove Programs and delete it. If you restart the machine it goes to a boot menu and you have the choice of Windoze or LM. This worked quite well but over the last two weeks or so the standby issue has gotten worse. And troubling is that even from a cold start many times you get a black screen that says the hard drive is either non-existent or had a fatal error. Strike F1 to try again or F2 to enter boot menu. Yet if you unplug the machine for ten minutes or so and then reconnect it, it will usually go to the boot menu and let you start normally from either OS. If I wait for say, only a minute, I will usually get the same error. Strange stuff indeed.
I suspect a boot or registry error or some such. I am not a pc savvy technician. I can boot easily to the BIOS so all seems well there. Could this be related to the system battery that keeps your time and BIOS settings? Also, today, for the first time, there was some sort of BSOD thing on the screen when I rolled the mouse with a full page of white text mentioning the pc was not shut down properly and the hard drive may be fatal and all that sort of thing. I had thought about deleting the 30GB install partition of LM, using CCleaner to thoroughly clean up temp files, browser cache, and registry items and then doing a complete malware and virus scan and of course a restart. So can you guys help me? This is irritating.
Regards, Todd