Maybe there is no ONE answer
Thursday, February 3, 2005 at 8:34 pm
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Larrybum
(1 messages posted)
I think more than one or two issues are in play here. I was working on our church
computer and found it slow as Christmas. I downloaded and ran adaware. It ran for
4 hours, getting slower and slower as it ran. It had found some 66K spyware files
at this point, most in a directory that appeared to hold an old OS (Migrated from
ME to XP) and had an option to uninstall XP.
Since the machine had effectively stopped...examining one file every minute or so.
I had to simply shut it off....kind of dangerous, I know. I let it run chkdsk coming
back up. I ran msconfig and set it in diagnostic mode (cutting off a lot of services
and devices). I then ran a disk cleanup program that comes with XP and found that
I could eliminate the old OS files...which I did. I rebooted, again in diagnostic
mode, and ran adaware again. This time, it completed in a few minutes...found two
registry problems and a handful of spyware files (kind of strange it was now so few).
The machine had some pop to it now.
I rebooted, reenabled the normal startup and everything looked good. Next day the
secretary complains that she can't print anything. I go by and check it out. Internet
access is fine...everything seems to work except:
1. no printers are listed in the printers faxes window
2. No scanners are listed, although a digital camera had been installed and a scanner
was attached.
3. The device manager showed a blank.
What I found here was that somehow a whole string of services were disabled. I looked
at the list running "services.msc". I clicked on each one at a time and set disabled
to "automatic". I rebooted the machine and it's working fine now.
So my problem, although described a lot like others in this thread actually had nothing
to do with permissions. I can see however that you should have the same problem if
you simply didn't have the rights to see these system utilities.
Maybe the abnormal end to the adaware run caused the trouble. Maybe my disabling
a lot of drivers and services as part of my temporarily cutting the load down on
the processor had something to do with this problem.
Whatever, this forum was invaluable to me in getting this corrected. A rebuild of
the computer would have been a nightmare. Thanks for all the good advice.
By the way, this machine was running service pack 1 when it failed.
On Wednesday, February 2, 2005 at 10:33 am, JoeMeister wrote:
>Hi,
>
>Windows XP Service Pack 2 did the same thing to my computer as well as disabling
>internet explorer from browsing the internet. When I unloaded windows xp service
>pack 2, I had an empty device manager and when I tried to install a 56k modem for
>doing faxes no ports were showing. (this modem has worked before). Internet explorer
>was working, at least (I connect with high speed) I suspect that Microsoft has a
>virus on their site that causes this. If you don't think that this is possible -
>then please note that this has actually happened to me - I tried downloading a dialup
>networking upgrade for windows 98 from Microsoft's website in the past and it tried
>to plant a virus onto my computer... Oh, btw not only can't I see the hardware settings
>in device manager if I try to get the hardware settings by checking out the properties
>after clicking on a control panel icon, for example e.g. the keyboard the hardware
>settings are blank there too. Maybe there is some registry setting like "disable
>hardware properties display" or something like that that will fix this, I hope so,
>'cause I can't bloody well fax resumes anymore.....
>
>Joe
>
>
>
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All messages in this thread [show all]
 |  | |  | Maybe there is no ONE answer (Larrybum: Thu, Feb 3, 2005, 8:34 pm) |
| | | |  | Solution (Ed C: Mon, Feb 25, 2008, 7:04 pm) |
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