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Thanks muchly Imacri.  Much appreciated.  I will check that out later. It sounds very hopeful! They are .xls and .wks files.  I think the oldest I have are from 2003 !!

Many thanks to everybody for all the suggestions. He has tried the majority of things, but with no luck.  He is resigned to the fact that he is going to have to take it into the shop to have it looked at, and possibly something needs to be replaced. But which something?!!

I will update you when something concrete happens, let you know the outcome.

Cheers, Keith.

Hi Microfix.

Yes, vacuumed and blown out everything.  Actually, there wasn’t anywhere near as  much as I thought there might be. I’ve certainly seen a lot worse, many times.

“Visual glitches” needs to be defined

oldguy, join the club! Me too! Nearly 80.

Basically white box outlines around chat boxes where you reply to things from other users, also around replying typing field, and around the submit button. Also in Halo Master Chief edition, version Halo 1, some ammo casings are only part showing, leaving the words on the casing floating in mid air. Some websites, such as Youtube video download sites, that worked before the reformat, crashed all browsers. Firefox, Torch, Chrome, Opera, Edge, Internet Explorer. Those crashes stopped after updating drivers with CCleaner, but that’s when the visual glitches started.  First Speed Fan attachment shows temps etc. after computer was idle for about 20 minutes. Second one after computer was used for about an hour. A bit of heat there!

“Hardware wise. That Page File @ 13GB seems high. Does this machine have an SSD drive? How much space is left on the drive?”

“If Windows is running on a hard disk it is time to add/replace a SSD.”

Hi mike and Alex 5723.  He has said:

The pc’s drive is an SSD, and has 361 GB free of 445 GB.  It’s used as a gaming PC, and was working well until it slowed down, still using the same games, hence the reformat.

It was originally bought July 2019. It was given to him for his birthday at beginning of November 2019.

Cheers.

Thankyou PKCano. May be starting to get somewhere. He gave me the following note:

got past the ‘api-ms-win-crt-heap-l1-1-0.dll is missing’ thing, now i’m getting the following error.

the application was unable to start correctly (0xc00007b)

can you ask woody about it?

So, any thoughts on the next step please?

Thanks everybody for all your assistance so far.

Still no go. It still just sits there saying Checking For Updates, but does nothing else.  He says Stand Alone Installer  also says Searching This Computer for Updates.

The computer was originally Win 8.1 then upgraded to  Win 10, but  during a later reformat, also to 10, it “destroyed” everything including the old 8.1 System Recovery Image, even though it was told to do just the drive  where Windows was installed.  So legitimate 8.1 discs were obtained, and reformatting with the discs restored the computer to 8.1 and updated okay. Over a period more reformats were done using System Recovery created by the discs, with no problem, and updates went smoothly.

This time the reformat was done using the same Recovery Image made by the discs, but the cvomputer is refusing to update this time, even when left to run overnight. And that’s where we are currently.

The reformats were required because he does a lot of gaming, and it’s not really a gaming computer, and gets slow.    Reformatting gets it back to about the original speed.

The above may give some clues as to what is happening.

Thanks for the suggestions.

He’s tried the above, without any luck.   SHS-2 and Servicing Stack updates, he couldn’t find.  Do you have a link for them? So, at this stage, he’s made no progress at all!

Anybody got any more suggestions please?

It’s been okay for about ten days or so now. I’m not quite sure what I did to fix it, or if it fixed itself, but all is good at this stage. Thanks for your help everybody. Now I’ll have to start a new thread soon, for my son’s XP computer rebooting itself.

I have a webcam, but I never use it! It has a light that shows when it’s on, reasonably bright, but I’ve not seen any signs of it being on.

Chuckle. Go for it Guys!

Another 24 hours, and all is still good. The only reason I use Sleep is because it’s so quick to both turn off, and turn on, just a few seconds. To restart from scratch takes some minutes. Thanks to everyone

Mind you, I just realised, while I was away, it was powered off, not asleep. But the 10 hours last night, it was asleep.

Well, I’m not quite sure what’s changed, but all is good. At the moment anyway. I’ve been away a couple of days, and no problem, came home last night and used computer, then put it to sleep. This morning, it hadn’t woken up.
BruceR, no there’s not enough vibration from trucks, and I didn’t yet get to try the lastwake, and the mouse didn’t appear to have a problem. The article was talking about Vista and Bluetooth, neither of which I have, so didn’t go into that any further, at that stage. This has happened before, and I didn’t really get to the bottom of it then, either, so I guess it could happen again. I’ll just have to wait and sere. Thanks everyone for your help and suggestions.

I’m using AVG Free, and it runs automatically whenever new updates are available. It also says Run when computer starts up if task has been missed. So presumably it doesn’t wake it up to run, otherwise it would be pointless having that checked.