In the ‘Performance and Maintenance’ control panel, I am running ‘Free up space on your hard disk’ to clean up temporary files. However, the window just sits there and the computer slows to a crawl with the CPU usage at 100%. The computer is running Windows XP. (more…)

Recently I cleaned up some old software from the hard drive. Now, the Windows boot sequence stops for about 90 seconds when loading the Windows taskbar before it finally resumes the sequence and then plays the Windows music. There is no noise from the HDD, only silence for the 90 seconds. The first icon which appears after the delay is the volume icon. Could the system be searching for an application which is no longer on the computer before it finally continues the booting process? I am finding this boot problem very annoying and frustrating! The computer is running Windows XP. (more…)

When Windows loads, the dialup networking window appears and to stop the message appearing the choice is either to connect to the Internet or press the ‘Cancel’ button 16 times. Is there any way of preventing this annoying request for a dialup connection? A second problem occurs with a digital image editing program and a video editing program. When loading either program, the following message appears: ‘Brooktree Capture Driver. BtViD: Failure loading VxD driver’. I cancel this message about 5 times before the software will finish loading. When loading the video software, another message appears: ‘Failed to initialize the video capture plug-in. Another program may be using it or the file has been moved. Device is already in use’. Both applications seem to work OK in spite of this, but when I try to shut down the computer, the machine freezes at the ‘Windows is shutting down’ screen. The system has is a 1.8 GHz Celeron running and Windows 98 SE. (more…)

When attempting to logon to my credit unions online banking site, after entering my member number and access code, a message appears saying that because the web site has been unused for 10 minutes I have been logged off. The website then redirects me back to the log-in page. And this duly happens, so I enter all the relevant information again only for the same message to reappear! The computer is running Windows XP home edition. I can access the site from my work computer. (more…)

My LITE-ON LDW-411S DVD+/-R recorder is having problems recognising recordable DVD disks. Whenever I load a blank DVD-R or DVD+R into the drive (regardless of the media’s brand) the label for the DVD drive in ‘My Computer’ changes from ‘DVD-RW Drive’ to ‘CD Drive’ and reports that there is 0 bytes data. Then, when attempting to copy data onto the DVD a message appears that the disk is full. The same error occurs regardless of which burning software is used (e.g., Windows Explorer, Alcohol 120%, Nero, and CloneCD). The drive can play DVDs and CDs correctly. The computer is a PIII 733 MHz with 256 MB RAM running Windows XP. (more…)