May

I Need A New Computer

Written by Neil Galloway

I am a computer engineer and certified geek. But I cannot figure out my computer of late. It has been giving me a lot of grief and I have had a hard time figuring it out.

Now when I boot up, there are no icons or the start menu bar at the bottom. The only way I can load programs is by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Delete, going into Task Manager, and using the Run menu command to start up programs. I have to remember the command though.

So just in case you are wondering, these are the ones I have used so far.

iexplore.exe - Internet Explorer
calc.exe - Calculator
outlook.exe - Microsoft Outlook
winword.exe - Microsoft Word

I am sure I will be learning more until I figure out my problem. My PC is over 4 1/2 years old now and has turned pretty grump the past 6 months. I even did a reinstall of XP on a brand new hard drive (my other one crashed) and it has been worse than it was with a 4 year old installation on it before.

Update

Thanks to Rob Dunn's, I downloaded autoruns from sysinternals. I installed it, disabled third party startup files I didn't recognize and now my computer is running better than it did before.

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Category: Computers

4 Comments

Rob Dunn Says:
2007-05-24 10:33:16
Try running 'explorer.exe' to get your Taskbar back...

You probably have something in your startup (malware, perhaps?) that is causing Explorer to die at startup. I would take a quick look at what is running at startup using autoruns from Sysinternals

neil Says:
2007-05-24 19:49:08
Thanks a bunch Rob. I took your suggestion and downloaded autoruns. That application is awesome. I flipped off a lot of the 3rd party applications I didn't recognize or knew I didn't want running and rebooted. My computer is running fine and boots up

Rob Dunn Says:
2007-05-25 09:18:42
Great to hear! I use that tool all the time when I have to work on a computer that runs or boots slow. I only have to hit three tabs really (startup, IE Browser Helper Objects, and services) for the most part.

Maybe you can eek some more life out of

Bruce Munro Says:
2007-05-30 12:59:33
Neil.. take that computer and toss into the first bin you see... splurge on a new one, and load on Vista.... that's all i can say... :)