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Can You Help Me Diagnose Some Serious PC Lockup/Crash Issues?

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
 
I am going to go off on a tangent. This may not be your problem, but ...

It is summer where you live? I am in the US southeast, and I get random power glitches during the day here. Those can really confuse a computer. Voltage spikes plus millisecond outages can play havoc with a system which is on all the time. Perhaps you could try shutting the machine down when you are not using it. If it stops mis-behaving, you have one clue.

For example, I have a wifi router at home that has to be reset about once a week this time of year.
 
I am with DaveyRay. I have all kinds of power fluctuation and my router resets itself and I see the lights go out and back on just fast enough that system doesn't shut down but I could see having problems if it was in powersave.
 
I'd ask in the Linux Mint forums, most linux forums you will get a quick reply. One thing to check if your anti-virus or windows defender is seeing LM as a virus. When you look in your task manager is LM running in the background (it may also be a Virtual Manager). You may also want defrag your hard drive and run a chkdsk -- windows doesn't like changes to the disk architecture especially when made by linux.
 
Well so far Antivira has not popped up anything regarding virus or complaining about LinuxMint. But a chkdsk and defrag are in order. If nothing else deleting the LM partition will hurt nothing. I have just been playing around with it and have nothing important residing there.
 
Coming out of standby or hibernation could be a conflict between the operating system and the system BIOS settings. If you have such things enabled in both of those then one can prevent the other from functioning as it should and lock up the system. So check your BIOS settings to see what power saving features you have enabled there, and then check your operating system settings. Use the features from either the BIOS or the operating system, but not both at the same time.

And just for the heck of it, run chkdsk/f to check for errors. That command fixes an amazing amount of problems.
 
I have a Dell XPS about 5 years old and sometimes when the machine boots up it goes right into power saver and the monitor goes out. It does it on and off and always comes out of it within a minute or less. Maybe some Dell issue.
 
There is/was a known bug about Windows XP and Standby. :cursing:
If you do a search engine query into “Windows XP standby” you will see quite a few sites with people having the same problem as you describe. There are probably as many ways to diagnose the problems, as there are computers with the problem. In the end, the remedy, if you can call it that, is to disable the standby feature in Windows XP.
1. Go into the power settings and set the monitor to shut off at whatever time limit you desire.
2. While there, set the hard drive to “Never” shut down.
3. Set the Standby option to “Never” as well.
This way, the monitor shuts down, after whatever time you set, and the computer will “rumble” back to life and “off you go,” just like it used to.

It may not be the magical cure you were seeking, but it should prevent your problems from reoccurring. :w00t:

Try this out and let us know if it’s working for you. :001_smile
 
If you decided to delete the LM partition make sure to back up the MBR. You can unintentionally delete the Grub configuration file leaving your system unbootable (without a rescue disc). If you go that route, I'd do the uninstall from XP, then boot your LM CD and re-install back into that partition. That way your LM install is completely independent of your XP install.
 
There is/was a known bug about Windows XP and Standby. :cursing:
If you do a search engine query into “Windows XP standby” you will see quite a few sites with people having the same problem as you describe. There are probably as many ways to diagnose the problems, as there are computers with the problem. In the end, the remedy, if you can call it that, is to disable the standby feature in Windows XP.
1. Go into the power settings and set the monitor to shut off at whatever time limit you desire.​

2. While there, set the hard drive to “Never” shut down.
3. Set the Standby option to “Never” as well.
This way, the monitor shuts down, after whatever time you set, and the computer will “rumble” back to life and “off you go,” just like it used to.

It may not be the magical cure you were seeking, but it should prevent your problems from reoccurring. :w00t:

Try this out and let us know if it’s working for you. :001_smile

This is exactly how I have XP configured. It is why this threw me for such a loop. I never went into LM and set any power configuration settings. I did uninstall LM through Windows and all went well. I just got home from visiting my mum and I had it do a full virus scan while I was gone. I will report results.

Regards, Todd
 
Okay guys, some updates. I found that somehow Malwarebytes had been unintstalled! I do not remember doing this. So I cleared the cash and let CCleaner do a good cleaning. I then had Avira do a complete scan of the pc and it found only a couple of items and I let it quarantine them. Then another oddity showed itself. I did a few reboots and noticed each time Avira would sent a pop up indicating a virus or something was trying to infect the pc. So I let it remove it and then it would show this tiny window saying a scan was taking place but it would only last a few moments and then quit. Something was definitely not right. So I uninstalled Avira and downloaded the latest free version, installed it in safe mode, updated it, and then let it do a short scan. Nothing.

So next up is CCleaner again. This time to clean up the registry. I am really wigged about Malwarebytes disappearing on me. I may have removed it(for what reason?) but I do not remember doing so. The machine is perkier now and does not seem to have the standby issues it did with the LM install sitting alongside XP. I will post anything unusual that comes up on Malware or Avira. You never know when some tidbit may be useful to someone. I know an issue a few months back on my wife's netbook was resolved with help here and other searches. Stupid Google Redirect virus. That one was a MAJOR pain to get rid of.

Regards, Todd
 
As an added precaution I downloaded Kapersky's TDSSKiller and scanned the pc. Nothing, not even the dreaded Google redirect. So far so good.

Regards, Todd
 
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