smooshie

Hello,

My mom's computer (Dell Dimension 4100, Windows ME) has been freezing up the last few months, and nothing seems to help. She blames it on the humid weather, I really dunno.

It's not connected to any particular application as far as I can tell, sometimes she's on the Internet, sometimes it's while my little brother is playing games. Other times, it's just after we restart it after we froze (at the login screen, or ScanDisk)

No errors before/during freeze-up, I've run anti-virus checks, spyware checks (Ad-Aware), nada. But ScanDisk often tells us that the boot count or something is messed up, I don't have the exact quote though.

We have a dial-up connection (56K) since a few months ago, although the freezes have started occuring before then. But maybe it's just my memory, but I'm sure when we first got the computer, I used to play Civ 3 on it for hours and hours without any problems .

Any suggestions? Or is the 5-year-old computer ready to be replaced?

whodat

greetings
open the side and inspect it for dust and hair, clean it out
give us the model and size of the power supply while the side is off
then put a floor fan blowing in to see if it restarts again
it might need a reapply of artic 5 thermal compound after 5 years for the cpu.
post back

smooshie

Joy.

Well, my mother decided to take the computer apart and do the first step, while I was shopping. Naturally, something had to go wrong. But the computer hasn't frozen up on me yet.

On the other hand, the display is at 16 colors, 640*480. Even if I try to change it, it prompts me to restart the computer. When I boot up (or restart) the computer, the scroll, caps lock, and num lock lights all blink twice (or three times), and the display doesn't change at all.

Moreover, the mouse cursor completely vanished, but I solved that problem by going into msconfig and unchecking "System.ini" from loading. Now the mouse works, at least until I check system.ini back.

So yeah, we fixed one problem, but came back with a ton more.

n3gag

whodat

n3gag --please start your own thread so we can deal with one at a time, your more than welcome to post your problem.

smooshie -- do you have norton installed on that computer? what virus checks have you performed? run housecall to start with from the link below.
check your control panel for any yellow conflict symbols, and make sure your video card is fully seated, assuming the video isnt an on board control.

finally, try and give us the complete specs of the system including your power supply

post back

miss molly

Hi,
I'm new to this site and not overly technically skilled but the freezing-up problem description caught my eye since I'm having the same kind of issue with my IBM 390 laptop. The mouse cursor freezes and/or nothing on the screen will respond. I"m getting tired of restarting, or shutting down, and having to get the whole system going again. I'm also often getting an error described as c:/windows/system/shdocc.dll/dnserror.htm. This error seems to be making it nearly impossible for me to get on-line (via slow dial-up). Do I have two separate problems, or are they related somehow?
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Miss Molly

whodat

miss molly

welcome to tsf
it will be easier in the future if you start your own thread

first go to start -run -type misconfig, then enter.. and look for any unusual processes running, actually put a post as to what is running.


then, hopefully your computer is able to perform these tasks
listed in this security section forum...very important
5 step process here:

http://www.techsupportforum.com/hija...ijackthis.html

good luck and post back

oshwyn5

Well, by unchecking the system.ini in msconfig, you prevented drivers from loading for most things. You are effectively running in safe mode driver wise.
What you need to do is return that check and go into system.ini tab and uncheck everythign. Then keep rebooting and adding things back until you get the problem and then you know what is causing the problem.
Update the driver for the guilty device.