Q. For no apparent reason, my HP Pavilion 8755C with Windows ME locks up while typing an e-mail or while online. CTRL-ALT-DEL will not free it up. The only thing to do is to power down and reboot. I have had my Internet service provider uninstall and reinstall Outlook Express and have had HP walk me through some sort of cleanup process, but this still occurs. Why does this happen and, more important, can you tell me how to prevent it? Please help!
— Mike Pappas, Hanover Park
A. These seemingly inexplicable problems such as your mini-nightmare can have a great many different causes because of the all-but-unthinkable complexity of a personal computer, particularly one attached to the Internet, Mr. P.
There are nearly 30 million lines of code in the Windows operating system, and it all must be made compatible with the enormous numbers of possible combinations that occur inside the PC when people load different software or connect peripherals like printers, mice and cable Internet modems. Microsoft’s Knowledge Base of potential problems fills gigabytes of storage space and doesn’t claim to cover all possible problems.
In your case I am stunned that the folks at your Internet provider didn’t urge you to shut down your cable modem and leave it off for several minutes. Just about everybody leaves cable modems plugged in all of the time, and they have a way of confusing their settings over time, causing many woes, including the lockups you describe. Try that modem shutdown trick first of all.
If that doesn’t help, use the Windows ME System Restore feature to take your machine back in time to the period before the crashes set in. Restore it at that point and see if that’s a fix. This is done by clicking on Start and then Accessories and System Tools and finally System Restore. This displays a calendar with numerous possible restore points.
Your final option is to fish out the original disks that came with your computer and reinstall all of the operating system after formatting the hard drive. You must, of course, back up any data on the hard drive first.
Q. I would like to say I enjoy your articles in the Sunday’s Stars and Stripes here in Germany. My question to you is that when I click Start and then Run and type in msconfig.exe, I get a thing called the Start Up tab. There I see many programs starting every time my machine boots up. I would like to delete the unused files and duplicated ones. What will happen?
— George Kahela @attglobal.net
A. In msconfig.exe you have found one of the most powerful tools a user can wield in Windows 98 and above. So, since Stars & Stripes came up, I must salute you for finding it.
This program is the key to disabling a raft of nasty and unwanted programs that various software vendors slip onto consumers’ PCs for their own selfish reasons.
A great many nagging pop-ups to register programs or to buy upgrades get placed in the Windows Startup routines, and msconfig lets users simply remove a check mark beside each one to deep-six it on the spot.
There are maybe three items you want to leave alone: ScanRegistry, SystemTray and the PowerProfile settings. All the rest can be eliminated, and doing so often will free up system resources and make your machine work faster and more reliably.
Keep in mind that if you remove something that’s needed, you simply can run msconfig again and restore it. In the most extreme case, which is almost certain not to occur, one can restart a PC in Safe Mode and then run msconfig to do any needed restores. Most machines go into Safe Mode if you hold down Control or F8 during bootup. Check your manual in case yours is different.
Q. I have a medium-format camera (Hasselblad). I was wondering what megapixel size would be equivalent in terms of quality?
— Steven Keels, Villa Park
A. As much as we hobbyists enjoy our megapixel digital cameras, they don’t come close to holding a candle to the quality of image reproduction on a proper professional camera like your Hasselblad, Mr. K.
Although consumers seem to find the new 4 megapixel cameras deliver stunning clarity, the fact remains that Kodak and other major photo companies offer a 16 megapixel resolution “proback” product for cameras like your Hasselblad. That’s 16 million pixels per picture, enough data to hold half a CD worth of music just to create one image.
The price is impossibly high–running in the $12,000 neighborhood–and that illustrates just how far we must go before the best digital cameras come close to matching the quality of the traditional chemical-on-celluloid film of our parents and grandparents. For details go to www.kodak.com and use the search term “proback.”
Q. I have a Dell computer and use Windows 98. For no obvious reason to me, my computer just quits, and I can’t even turn it off in the recommended method. This freezing seems to have started shortly after I installed McAfee Virus Scan, but I am not sure that had anything to do with the problem. Also, at least once, I have lost the use of my cursor for no apparent reason. My computer is about 2 years old, but I don’t think I should be having this kind of problem. Can you help?
— Bob Bland, Zephyrhills, Fla..
A As I told Mr. P. at the top of today’s column, these mysterious freeze-ups are the mini-tragedies that afflict a great many computer users, possibly a majority of us, I fear. The chips that power computers like yours have perhaps 2 million transistors, and those 2 million transistors run a whopping 30 million lines of computer code with the Windows operating system alone.
Add software like word processors, Web browsers and, of course, antivirus programs, and the complexity snowballs ever further. Given the fact that at any given time something can change the way data from millions of lines of code flows through those circuits, freeze-ups, cranky performance and other problems are common as cockroaches and equally welcome.
Before you take the ultimate reformat and start over with the steps I urged on Mr. P., I urge you to uninstall McAfee and all references to it in your start-up routines. To get rid of the McAfee start-up, follow the steps I told Mr. K. in the column’s second item and run msconfig.exe and then uncheck the McAfee start-up item.
Then uninstall the software itself. To do this click on Start and then Settings and Control Panel. This takes you to an icon for Add/Remove programs. Use it to eradicate McAfee Virus Scan. That software runs in the background examining everything that comes in and goes out of the computer for viruses, worms, macro viruses and other mischief.
As you can imagine, there can come times when this background scanning interferes with an ongoing process such as running the mouse, as you are experiencing.
Finally, if all these steps fail, your best bet is to try a “system restore” to before you loaded McAfee. That, too, is described above. If that fails, a complete reinstallation of the operating system all but certainly will fix your problem until the next time things get confused.
———-
Contact Jim Coates via e-mail at jcoates@tribune.com or via snail mail at the Chicago Tribune, Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago IL 60611. Questions can be answered only through this column. Add your point of view at chicagotribune .com/askjim.
