system lock up – freeze (xp completely current)

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Periodically I get a complete system lock up – not enough to be able to repeat. I just recovered from one that apparently was caused by Outlook 2003. I was trying to forward – edit emails. Screen was filled with several windows and could not “X out” of any of them.

When this happens I cannot get into either task mgr (alt-ctl-del) or wintasks.exe to see what is happening.

I normally have about 1.2 mb of available storage and to the best of my knowledge nothing else is running – I don’t use google desktop and don’t normally have windows doing searches or indexing.

My only thought is that I have either run out of cycles or memory when the lockups occur.

Is there any way to “force taskmgr into execution” to see what is happening? I might be able to run wintasks.exe constantly but I don’t normally do that.

Rebooting is usually the only solution I have. Is there some way to capture system status into a file that I can look at(check) after a reboot? Is there a way to force wintask.exe or taskmgr to log to a file? Is there a way to force a look at allocated memory to see if it has been filled up?

Tom

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Tom,
After the fact, you might try to look at Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Event Viewer, to see if there are any error entries in any of the event logs.
Might give you a clue as to what’s happening?

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Bob

Everything seems to be recorded on the reboot – nothing prior to pulling the plug

Tom

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You could try start Task Manager right after you boot the system. Select the Processes tab & sort descending by CPU. Then size it so only the tip 4 or 5 show and move it to a corner of your display. That way maybe you can see if a program takes over the PC.

Joe

--Joe

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1.2MB of available storage? If that’s not a typo, you need to do some cleanup. I’d also suggest setting the pagefile size manually.

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How large is your HD and how much RAM do you have ??? I agree with Jeremy… you don’t have enough free space on your drive to be opening all those windows if you only have 1.2 MB free space.

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Slot ‘DIMM_4’ is Empty
Slot ‘DIMM_3’ is Empty
Slot ‘DIMM_2’ has 1024 MB
Slot ‘DIMM_1’ has 1024 MB
Local Drive Volumes
c: (NTFS on drive 0) 116.59 GB 31.37 GB free
d: (NTFS on drive 0) 39.65 GB 25.39 GB free

This is off belarc advisor’s current profile

Tom

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available memory 10242064 bytes

Tom

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>c: (NTFS on drive 0) 116.59 GB 31.37 GB free

You’ve got plenty of RAM. My guess would be that your problem is the free space on the C drive. It’s less than 25%. If you can transfer 10 GB to the D drive (if that is just for data storage) or move it to an external medium I’d suspect that would stop the system lockups.

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Another possibility is that your system needs a thorough cleaning and defrag. Do you do regular system maintenance ??

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I dunno, Doc.
31+ gigs free on an XP machine?
Sounds OK to me. RAM is plenty, as you say.
Cleanup could be a possibility?
How many apps does he have running at once, including background apps?

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From the OP’s first post…. “I just recovered from one that apparently was caused by Outlook 2003. I was trying to forward – edit emails. Screen was filled with several windows and could not “X out” of any of them.”

He also said something about “normally” having about 1.2 MB free. Free what I’m not sure.

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I normally run with approx 1,200 mb of storage available. Haven’t run a defrag in a while

I will scrape some of the junk off the C drive – see if that helps.

I have an external hard drive – so it won’t be a problem to move a bunch of stuff offline.

Thanks for all of the head scratching – if I magically find what is going on – I will let everyone know

Thanks

Tom

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Tom,
1.2 MB is a BIT ( pun ) different than 1200MB.
Happy cleaning. I think it will be a big help.

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Do not worry about RAM usage unless you observe that it is typically above 80% of your installed amount. Your RAM usage will increase and decrease through normal usage. If XP happens to need more memory than what is available it will use your pagefile to save some of what is in memory until enough is available to satisfy the need. For most people running XP 2 GB of RAM is plenty for day-to-day use.

As far as your system hangs go have you checked the event logs? Have you tried loading Task Manager as I suggested in post 743998?

Joe

--Joe

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Yes I did – no hangups so far
Tom

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Joe,
I think he tried that. post 743,994

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You’re right. My bad.

Joe

--Joe

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In watching the task mgr table – the most active tasks appear to be outlook.exe, winword.exe,pctsSvc.exe

Outlook is fluctuating from 00 to 40% – I have a relatively noisy hard drive and I can hear accesses being made that seems to correspond to Outlook

Is there a mechanism in Outlook to regulate how often it goes out to check for mail? I have Outlook checking GMAIL and Hotmail currently.

I realize this should be in Outlook forum, but I said I would share findings in this forum.

Tom

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To change the frequency of how often Outlook 2003 checks for new email.

1. Go to Tools -> Options…
2. Click the Mail Setup tab.
3. Click the Send/Receive button.

There you can edit the schedule.

Otherwise, have you run a full Chkdsk recently? – noisy hard drives frighten me….

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In Outlook, select Tools | Options…
Activate the Mail Setup tab.
Click Send/Receive…
You’ll see the send/receive groups that have been defined, and how often they send/receive automatically. The interval preferably should not be less than 5 minutes. If the interval is too short, Outlook may get stuck in an endless loop.

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Running CHKDSK now –

I changed send receive to 8 minutes from 5

Thanks

Tom

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