I located an old hard drive stored on a shelf the other day and connected it to my Vista machine with a USB dongle. I decided to defrag it (350Gb). Now, I already know that Vista's defrag provides NO indication of progress other than that pretty lame statement that "this may take a few minutes to a few hours". I've seen mention of other defraggers here in this NG and am wondering if any...

I'm a complete dummy when it comes to computers so I hope someone can help me with this. I bought my Acer laptop with Vista on it about two years back. The C drive is the drive that hold all my programs, the D drive is for extra backup. Yesterday my laptop was showing me an error saying I'm low on memory. I thought that to be odd as I haven't really installed anything. So I uninstalled programs...

More than likely whats happening is that C: drive doesn't have enough room to do the auto back-up anymore. Either that, or your putting info on the D: partition like stated above. On your desktop, hold the windows key and press R the run box will open type cleanmgr hit enter there will be an option or a tab to clean up old back-ups for system recovery and keep only the most recent. Use...

I'm sorry if some of this information is vague, not too great with computers...anyways... I have Gateway laptop with Vista (not sure if it's 64-bit or 32-bit) and I've been using it for about 10 months and yesterday, I noticed that when I got online, it was really laggy and saw that 99% of the memory was being used, so I decided to restart it. (I didn't even have three programs up.) Right before...

I have Vista Home Premium 32-bit OS. I possibly want to upgrade to Windows 7 equivalent. Here's my dilemma: I installed Service Pack 1 via Windows website download manager, and after a fashion, it appeared to have installed and it rebooted my system. It clearly shows as having been installed according to Windows Update History. HOWEVER, according to Microsoft, when I click START right...

Inspiron 1420 Laptop Windows Vista Home Premium Internet Explorer 8 Anti-Virus Webroot PC Utility Inc. Error Fix Startup/Shutdown- 5 to 7 minutes When booted, three different blank (green screens) pop up. The third, and last green screen closes after about 3 minutes Once bootup is complete, icons may not work

Inspiron 1420 Laptop Windows Vista Home Premium Internet Explorer 8 Anti-Virus Webroot PC Utility Inc. Error Fix Startup/Shutdown- 5 to 7 minutes When booted, three different blank (green screens) pop up. The third, and last green screen closes after about 3 minutes Once bootup is complete, icons may not work

After booting up the computer and logging on, everything works for ~5 minutes before the bottom bar freezes up. Turning on the task manager does nothing to help as that too freezes up right away. Minimizing a tab means losing it for good and the recovery disks do not seem to be working at all. I have tried to use a system restore, but that did nothing to fix the problem. I have used two different...

My Windows Explorer (NOT Internet Explorer) keeps freezing with a title bar error message 'Not Responding'. I t may or may not resolve itself after about 10 minutes - more often not! I am usually given the option to restart it but then the desktop is refreshed and I lose about half my app tray icons! I had read the (similar) threads here but they date back to 2007 and none offer a...

Anyone ever received this? I'm running Windows Vista Business, the full version, on a Compaq Presario V3000. My computer froze this morning, and when I tried to CTRL-ALT-DEL and stop the frozen programs, I started getting this error: "Interactive logon process initialization has failed. Please consult the event log for more details." I tried to restart, but the only way I could was to hold...

I've posted vast detail about this problem at the link below. I wonder if anyone here has an answer. http://forums.techguy.org/windows-vista/889274-system-restore-will-not-restore.html

I have Vista Home Premium 32-bit OS. I possibly want to upgrade to Windows 7 equivalent. Here's my dilemma: I installed Service Pack 1 via Windows website download manager, and after a fashion, it appeared to have installed and it rebooted my system. It clearly shows as having been installed according to Windows Update History. HOWEVER, according to Microsoft, when I click START right...

Hi, I have something writing to the hard drive once every minute or so. I'm assuming this is preventing my laptop hard disk from sleeping when off power. It writes to 2 files, flipping between them: lastalive0.dat lastalive1.dat The process is svchost.exe. The files are in:

I'm running Vista Home Premium SP2 with 2 GB of RAM, all WU's, Firefox, MBAM, SuperAntiSpywareProfessional, CCleaner, Spybot, CA Security Suite, and WLM. The machine's running just great but after the last restart (to complete the uninstall of Ad-Aware) my little Lexmark All-In-One printer icon is missing from the notification area. It's usually placed right next to my network icon. I've tried...

Alright when i start up my laptop it goes into the HP invent screen and shows the F keys at the bottom. Than after a little bit it goes onto the screen that has the blinking underscore (the blinking _ sign" than it just stays there... It makes these loud beeping noises than stops after a little bit. I don't know what to do and I REALLY don't want to take it to a professional for reasons i don't...

I'm running Vista Home Premium SP2 with 2 GB of RAM, all WU's, Firefox, MBAM, SuperAntiSpywareProfessional, CCleaner, Spybot, CA Security Suite, and WLM. The machine's running just great but after the last restart (to complete the uninstall of Ad-Aware) my little Lexmark All-In-One printer icon is missing from the notification area. It's usually placed right next to my network icon. I've tried...

I'm getting what looks like inefficient use of the memory on two of my computers. On one, with 8 GB, Windows Task Manager - Performance currently reports: Physical Memory Usage History constant at 4.90 GB Physical Memory (MB)

I am using Windows Vista Home Premium operating system with my HP laptop. Suddenly from last few weeks the system has started throwing following error messange in a separate window continuously. "XPTask.dll has stopped working" Can you please suggest me the solution? Thanks, CJ

This relates to my experience with Vista Home Premium so I cannot comment on other versions. My experience has been that this ##### utility for reporting problems once it finds a fault continues to seek out solutions to it when there are none. It clicks in the werfault.exe application which can one one instance take 50% of CPU and on occasions runs twice and takes all the CPU time. Fingers...

This relates to my experience with Vista Home Premium so I cannot comment on other versions. My experience has been that this ##### utility for reporting problems once it finds a fault continues to seek out solutions to it when there are none. It clicks in the werfault.exe application which can one one instance take 50% of CPU and on occasions runs twice and takes all the CPU time. Fingers...