No standby and sometimes no shutdown

[VipFREAK]

Hey all,

I'm not quiet sure what the problem is but what I can tell you is that only after I've been online courtesy of Aol my laptop will not go on standby it hangs at the blue xp screen. I've tried to reload aol and it still hasn't solved the problem. I've don't a defrag and use regcleaner for xp as well. Once or twice even if I haven't been online it doesn't shutdown it hangs on the blue xp screen as well. I was wonder what are the potental reasons for this and if there are any "easy" fixes other than wiping the system. I've also recently downloaded and installed directx 9.0 as well I don't know if that is a potental cause though? I haven't updated recently but it hasn't been that long and the problem of not doing stand by and shutdown has started recently. Other than that I have not installed any other programs or changed the system in any way. Thanks

Nick

[nodnerb2]

Hi,

Not shutting down is usually caused by something running in the background that halts the shutdown process.

I am not too clued up with XP but in Win 9x vers you can do a Ctrl,Alt, Del( once) to see what is running in the background( I think the XP equivalent is Task Manager) Try ending the progs one at a time and see if it will shut down. In 9x you only need systray and explorer, I am not sure what these are called in XP but I am sure it won't take long for some XP Gurus to come along and steer you along the correct path

Cheers

Nodnerb2

[SiliconJon]

Yes, likely a resident program. Use CTRLaltDEL to look for a program that is using the CPU while your shutdown hangs. If it's explorer, then it could still be one of the other programs. "RUN" msconfig and click the last tab "STARTUP". There you will find most of the non-essential programs being loaded into your resident memory during windows' startup. If you can figure out which program it is in the task manager by ending tasks (the culprit will likely not end right away and will give you a seperate prompt to end the program), just remove that one. Sometimes, though, a program will give you this error and not be the culprit, as the culprit is still hanging parts of the system.

You can probably remove all the startup programs and she'll run just fine (though some programs may behave differently or incorrectly, in which you can go back and recheck their correspongind startup programs to have them load up next time).

Some programs to look out for are ones that come on DVD's like PCFriendly and Interactual, also adwares like GAIN, Gator, and many others.