Woohoo! (PIOG)

[the3Rs]

Two of our computers - 1 desktop & 1 laptop - have been completely non-functional for a very, very long time. I had resigned myself to the fact that they would never work again, but thought I'd give it one last try.



I spent a few hours working on them last night & they are both not only working, but working WELL & really fast!!!



Yeah!!! Glad I decided to try again! :)

[flutter523]

That great! I wish I knew something about computers

[WonderWomanSV]

Great job!

[leahbeah143]

 that's awesome! what did you do to get them working again?

[cjsmom1]

That's great!

[the3Rs]

On the desktop - once I was able to start it - I looked at the resource monitor and task manager performance tab and saw that the physical memory was at 99% and there was near ZERO free space on a computer with 6 gigs of RAM.  That didn't seem right - and my CPU usage was low - so I did a start>run>msconfig and hid all Windows services then disabled everything else.

Basically that means that I disabled all startup programs except Windows services.  Apparently, over the years that we've had this computer every program we've ever installed (and apparently some that installed without our knowledge) was starting at startup and comsuming every bit of memory even though we weren't using those programs.

I had previously gone through and deleted all unnecessary programs, but what was left was still starting up in the background and I simply didn't need them.  As soon as I restarted my physical memory was super low, with tons of free space and it works perfectly.  :)

---------------

The laptop was trickier because it was stuck in a start-up loop.  I would see the 'Windows starting' screen - then it would go black - then it would start all over again - but it would never actually boot.  I was unable to start in safe mode either.  But, then I remembered that a couple of years ago we had taken it in to fix it because the hard drive had crashed, and the repairman had given me a boot CD.  I found it, put it in, said to boot from CD and then navigated through his millions of menus items until I saw an option for registry scan.  I knew the problem was a registry error so I did the scan - found 8 registry errors which were automatically fixed - rebotted and VOILA!  Works like a charm.  :)

Quoting leahbeah143:

 that's awesome! what did you do to get them working again?

[trfgirl56701]

That's awesome! Dh is the one that can figure out all that stuff in our house lol.

[deccaf]

Yay!  Good for you!

[mickstinator]

ahh, that's awesome! love it when you can fix something AND save the family some extra moolah.

[jurnee14]

Awesome!