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Old May 24th 04, 08:11 PM
Chris
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Default Lots of Problems all of a Sudden

I wonder if anyone can help me. I am having a lot of problems with my WIN 98 2nd Edition Compaq Presario 5716 computer and I am running out of options. I thought the problems might be memory-related, so yesterday I installed another 128 MB of RAM. Now all three sockets have 128 MB each, and there are no more sockets. I have a lot of memory and there is a huge amount of free space in the hard disk pie. So we need to exclude space and memory problems because the same problems persist even after yesterday’s installation of the new memory.

One of my problems is that applications are very sluggish. For example, it will take a good 30 seconds to open a word document, and 15 to 30 seconds to open a web page (I have speed internet Cable). Another problem is that, very often, programs don't respond. I know it because there is no action following a prompt, and the pc gets locked (I can't go anywhere with my browser), and when I click Ctrl + Alt + Del, the close programs window says that the program I am using is not responding.

Finally, when I click on shut down, the screen dims for a while and then a box appears with the following message: "This program is not responding. It may be busy, waiting for a response from you, or it may have stopped running. Click cancel to ignore and return to Windows. To close, click End Task. To give the program 20 seconds, click wait." If I click on “End Task� usually nothing happens. So if I click again and the screen isn’t frozen yet, a copy of the same window may overlap the original window. Sometimes two or three partial windows overlap one another. The whole thing eventually freezes, and I have no choice but to manually shut down and restart the unit.

Upon restarting, I notice that ScanDisk doesn’t run anymore to check for errors due to improper shut down. It has stopped doing that several weeks ago, when all these problems started. When I attempt to run ScanDisk from the Systems Tools I get the following message: "ScanDisk cannot check this drive now because the disk is not properly formatted or a program such as disk utility has locked it. Format the disk or wait for the utility to finish and then restart ScanDisk."

Some of the desktop icons have lost their normal appearance, almost as if there weren’t enough memory to support color-shaping and coding them. The desktop background picture often becomes segmented, like sliced in rows and rows of faces, legs, or whatever. Everything runs extremely slow and incorrectly.

Sometimes, when I try sending mail from a web page through Outlook Express, I get the following message: "Outlook Express could not be started. The application was unable to create the spooler object. Your computer may be out of memory or your disk is full. Contact MS support for further assistance (0x8007000E), or "The Address Book failed to load. Outlook Express is incorrectly configured. Please re-install."

When I try opening OE I get this message: "Outlook Express couldn't be started because MSOE.DLL could not be initiated. Outlook Express may not be installed correctly."

Other error messages I receive: "MSGSRV32 caused a stack fault in module USER.EXE @ 0006-00007556", or "Kernel 32 caused an invalid page fault in module USER.EXE @ 0006-000016fc"

I’m also been getting a “connection� error message, as follows: “No connection to the internet is currently available. To view internet content that has been saved on your computer, click work offline. Click Try Again to attempt to connect.� When I click “Try Again� I get in. This message is totally inappropriate because I have high speed internet cable meaning that I am always connected to the internet.

It bothers me that If I start anything: a project, a research, open a document, send an email, or whatever, I get interrupted because the pc can’t perform a requested task, or because the computer locks, ceases to respond, or it sends me an Illegal Operation or Fatal Error message that gets me booted out al together. Also, it takes forever to open a web page, or any application, worse than if I had dial-up, instead of cable.

By the way, very important: ALL VIRUS SCANS, NORTON DIAGNOSTICS, AND SYSTEMS DIAGNOSTICS REPORT NO VIRUSES AND NO ERRORS. MS Windows update report no critical updates. Add/Remove Hardware reports nothing new needing to be downloaded. Can anybody help me?