Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Helping your Technotard friends and relatives

Oh my. I just got roped into doing something similar. At least I'm getting paid for it.

Problem solved.

Compaq crapware + HP MFD + Norton.

Still need a memory upgrade, too.

REALLY appreciate the help!

If you're going the memory route, check out NewEgg.com. At the very least, to get a feel for what your friend will need. They have a pretty good memory configuration tool that can help you figure out exactly what kind of RAM his PC was designed to use.

They are my go-to online retailer for computer hardware. Especially for RAM and hard drives. Their selection is incredible, their prices are among the lowest, and their shipping is usually speedy (pay the $1.99 for expedited shipping). At least, in my experiences.

Good luck!

Glad to hear you found the problem so quickly.

I was going to suggest that sometimes, rather than going through all of the great troubleshooting and 'cleaning' suggestions above that it is sometimes just easier to back up the data, format and start fresh and clean.

I like to do this at least every 2nd year or so and I find I always end up with a much faster machine than when I try to 'clean it up'. I keep a pretty tight ship via regular usage of the above techniques anyways but I find a clean start is still the best medicine after a while.

Depends on your usage, habits and fear of the format command though. It's not for everyone.

Yes, Peter, I don't know what I'd do without Newegg. They are the best. Fortunately, the Compaq support page was actually pretty helpful in specifying the RAM (184 pin SDRAM PC3200, up to 4x1GB - currently 2x256MB).

I think RAM has gone up in price over the last ~6 months. Did anybody else notice that?

This is not the first time I've had trouble with the software HP provides to go along with their all-in-ones.

I would classify myself as less savvy than Tom - maybe "Pidgen Geek". There are things in my startup that I do not want there. To remove is it as easy as unchecking the boxes?

msconfig is more of a debugging tool. It does disable the item from starting, but it not supposed to be considered a permanent solution. Running the tool again may end up re-enabling programs. The only real way to stop the stuff is to remove their start entries from the registry, with all the caveats that entails. So, yeah, msconfig will work for the most part, just be sure to check from time to time that everything you want disabled is still disabled.

Chris,
How do you remove the entries from the registry?

First you need to start the Registry Editor, by running regedit.

The following is from memory, I'm not on a Windows machine right now to verify.

There are two sets of Run keys in the registry. They are located in both the HKEY Current User, and HKEY Local Machine. Under those go to Software, Microsoft, Windows, Current Version, Run. In the Run folder you'll find the entries for each process which will be started with the machine. Remove the ones you don't wish to have start.

Messing in the Registry without knowing what you're doing will quickly make your machine inoperable, with the only method of repair being to reinstall Windows. That's the caveat of which I spoke.

I've had pretty good luck with Startup Inspector for Windows.