lust2luv Posted February 2, 2006 Share Posted February 2, 2006 Bought my mum a new Dell PC - nothing flash, just a cheap Dimension 1100. Installed it for her yesterday but when I booted it up it had all manner of problems. Anyone care to shed any light on what's up before I attempt to call Dell's Indian call centre? Initial boot up, fill in some Dell set-up information, creating a user account, etc. (keyboard and mouse work), Windows XP (SP2) then boots up - the mouse cursor works, but button clicks have no effect and the keyboard doesn't work (both USB devices), so I have no choice but to hit the power off button. Try again - comes up with a Registry Recovery message, when it reboots it reaches the XP welcome screen pretty quick (although it just says 'Welcome' with no Windows logo and no choice of user account), from there it takes 2 minutes for the Windows start up sound and a further 4-5 minutes for Windows to load, during which time the processor isn't doing anything and no tasks seem to be running. Boots up okay in safe mode. Closes down fine. Any idea what's taking Windows so frickin long to boot up? Oh I also had a problem with Mcafee Virusscan saying a Winsock 2 file was required and trying to connect to Microsoft.com to download a Windows 95 version of it, despite having XP, in doing so crashing IE with a C++ runtime library error, but I uninstalled Mcafee and this went away. Cheers for any advice... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
caliAl Posted February 2, 2006 Share Posted February 2, 2006 Could be the hard disk. If you have a Windows disk boot to the recovery console and run check disk or do what I do whenever I get a new Dell PC and that's format the drive then do a fresh install so you don't get all the crappy Dell preloaded software Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lust2luv Posted February 2, 2006 Author Share Posted February 2, 2006 I'll check it out, but if it was hard disk related, wouldn't that effect booting up in safe mode too? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edd_t Posted February 2, 2006 Share Posted February 2, 2006 id get rid off mcafee to start with, see if thats buggering up your boot Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lust2luv Posted February 2, 2006 Author Share Posted February 2, 2006 Tis already gone (as stated above), that was the first thing I did. Ah, another thing I just remembered, the device manager is completely blank. All in all it's pretty FUBARed. I'm thinking 1. check if profile is corrupt 2. check hard drive 3. reinstall XP. Why does this happen every time I mail order a PC? The only time I never had problems was when I bought one in PC world. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edd_t Posted February 2, 2006 Share Posted February 2, 2006 Why does this happen every time I mail order a PC? The only time I never had problems was when I bought one in PC world. its a Dell, i dont like um! go HP/Compaq! not much use at moment, bit tipsy, woohoo Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lust2luv Posted February 4, 2006 Author Share Posted February 4, 2006 Okay, update time... I've tried creating a new user account and deleting the old in case it's a log in problem. I've run a checkdisk programme on the hard disk comes out all clear. I've run all manner of Dell system tests and all the hardware - memory, hard disk, cache, etc comes out clear. I've deleted every bit of preinstalled AOL softare of the PC (never a bad idea!) I'm at a loss. Basically after the XP Welcome screen the desktop appears and then for 5 minutes or more nothing happens, none of the processes seem to be doing anything - system idle is at 99% - then after 5 or 6 minutes everything loads and the task bar and icons appear. PC is brand new and has never been connected to the net, so virus / spyware is out of question. Anyone? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Supraman Posted February 4, 2006 Share Posted February 4, 2006 It seems like you have a device driver issue...probably corrupt or a program in startup. When you uninstalled the virus scan did you use XP uninstall or the McAfee uninstaller. Check Startup to see what's there and remove/disable. Check device manager for any yellow triangles with an exclamation mark against any entries. Check Task Manager to see if anything is consuming too much memory. Is it connected to the net...check network property settings. Failing all this I would format and do a clean install or use the Dell recovery disk. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lust2luv Posted February 4, 2006 Author Share Posted February 4, 2006 I used the McAfee uninstaller. The only item in device manager with a yellow triangle is appears to be some software for the network card, which I've disabled but doesn't solve the issue. Nothing consumes any memory in task manager - the PF is a flatline right through start up. Has never been connected to the net. Think there's only one item left in startup - can't recall what, but I'll check that out. Someone's suggested the hard drive might be set to PIO rather than DMA. Another possibility I've found is that it's searching for a network connection - so am going to set a dummy IP. Will also check start-up item. Failing that, I'm gonna try a Dell restore. Thanks for the suggestions! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hob Posted February 5, 2006 Share Posted February 5, 2006 usb? Unplug the usb's and replug them in, I have this all the time on dell (if its what I think) with wireless keyboard/mouse combo from logitech. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lust2luv Posted February 5, 2006 Author Share Posted February 5, 2006 Well finally got this sorted today by unleashing Dell Restore - don't know why I didn't give in and do it earlier, but I really wanted to work out what was up - best I can figure is a fictious LAN was causing all sorts of issues. Cheers for the suggestions guys. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lust2luv Posted February 13, 2006 Author Share Posted February 13, 2006 Okay, still having problems with my parent's PC. It's blue-screened with a stop message (1E and 8E I think, from memory) a few times on start-up. I've noticed there are a few sharing conflicts, in particular an IRQ being shared (see attached gif). Are any of these something to worry about that needs sorting? Cheers once again for any advice... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phoenix_TT Posted February 13, 2006 Share Posted February 13, 2006 These sites may help, http://aumha.org/win5/kbestop.php http://kadaitcha.cx/stop_err.html make a note of the exact error message and then search. Hope this helps ... Geoff Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lust2luv Posted February 14, 2006 Author Share Posted February 14, 2006 Cheers for the links - I'll get my mum to note down the error codes next time it happens. Any one have any thoughts on the conflicts though? Are they likely to cause problems? Or nothing to worry about? Cheers Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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