Replies

http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/ [easy; just resets password to its default of none]

A lot of password tools can be found on Hiren’s Boot CD, including Offline NT.

Are you sure you didn’t just kill too many brain cells on you vacation?

Anytime you turn the computer on from a powered down state it causes a surge of electricity to flow through the circuits. This always has a minute amount of damage to those circuits primarily at the weakest point (usually an impurity in the copper, a partial break or other restriction in the flow of electrons).

That said remember a plugged in PC is always partially powered up when turned “off.” The PSU or AC/DC converter takes wall power and coverts it to 12V and 3.3V and 5V DC for use by the computer. So the brunt of electrical surges should be borne by the PSU—and the better the PSU the better the handling of such current.

The wear and tear on electrical components while accumulative are pretty slight in simply turning it on from off over time. Plus this wear would equally exist in many phases waking up from a sleep state.

I just would not worry about it for the lifetime of the device: figuring most owners probably ride that horse for seven to twelve years, and their computers should be replaced by then having gotten the value out of their purchase. Well, that is my opinion on the matter.

If you have lousy power (like in a rural area) then further precautions might be warranted for all electrical equipment–frequent lightening storms–too but in this case disconnecting from the wall when not is use is the best solution and plugging back in somewhat harsh.

I have surge suppressors on most of my electrical equipment, UPS’ on PCs and generally turn my computers “off” at the end of the day putting them into sleep mode throughout the day when getting up. But this is due to my feeling that I like a complete memory wipe to start the day though one can safely get fast boots by multiple daily sleeping their PC for weeks until at some point an anomalous behavior is noted that usually gets cleared up by a reboot. For me the power up in the morning is no big deal as I am getting my coffee, etc. while the PC boots up.

With regards to the Macrium backup…ask him if he remembers the offer to make a Rescue disk when he first installed and ran Macrium? Vaguely… lol. That is how you restore. You boot up the rescue disk and then load the stored image.

Fortunately, any Macrium Rescue disk will do (WinPE, Bart or Linux). It does need to be either 32-bit or 64-bit version though as the backup came from or at least 32-bit for XP based I can’t quite remember. Once you have that plug his external drive in with the backup, and boot upon the Rescue disk and it should be pretty simple to reimage the HDD drive.

http://kb.macrium.com/KnowledgebaseArticle50082.aspx

But there should be no need if you just re-clean install as in my prior message.

Roy,

Since it is a clean install, anytime a install has ever failed part way through I always, simply put the disk back in and booted up to clean install again. Just nuke it and start over. Don’t try to continue the broken installation process.

If you are saying you cannot get the OS disk to boot that would imply either drive not working/recognizing a disk is present/damaged OS disk, ODD not selected as primary boot drive or you didn’t hit any key when prompted on boot to load the CD/DVD so it tries to boot to the failed Windows install instead. Can also setup to install Win7 from flash drive if need to.

…. with an aging OS. By the time you completely patch the OS and reinstall apps and update them it requires almost a day of my time (not all at the computer of course).

Could you make an OS image once you’ve done it all and recover to that at some point later? ….

Yup. Getting back that performance you used to have sucks. Setting aside a day to do it is pretty much par for course. A clean install allows you to clean out the drive of apps you no longer use (good security too) and check for updates on ones you intend on reinstalling. But you still pretty much need to back up the drive just in case, inventory the system and apps, uninstall any apps that use a registered license so you can reinstall the app or tune later without having to pay for a new license, download the latest drivers, update the BIOS and any firmware, clean out the dust bunnies (optional), slipstream everything including post-SP1 updates. And then get to it.

Of course this is also a time to consider adding RAM, a SSD boot drive and any other thing that might breathe more life into a PC. And counter weigh the costs/benefits and whether you waited too long to upgrade.

As for making a disk image…absolutely you should do this as it is a quick way of reinstalling the clean OS with apps. But down the road that install will be aging as will the apps re-installed. And nothing added since including data will be present (if that is in My Documents on another drive not a problem).

Interesting. I was going to suggest jumping over to 32-bit Java 8.11 runtime but noticed two things: It is still a developers release, not consumer and it no longer supports XP.

XP users who use OpenOffice or LibreOffice are soooooooo screwed.

The only popular app I know uses Java is OpenOffice and LibreOffice. Otherwise I see no reason to maintain it on a system unless you run an app that uses it.

Flash is hard to avoid with all of the online video one comes across.

The minidump log files are found in C:/windows/minidump folder.

The first part should be cut and pasted here, leave the rest off or risk the wrath of a moderator.

An example would be this:

Dump File : 072614-20311-01.dmp
Crash Time : 7/26/2014 6:21:54 PM
Bug Check String : KERNEL_MODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED
Bug Check Code : 0x1000008e
Parameter 1 : 0xc0000005
Parameter 2 : 0x82e839e5
Parameter 3 : 0xb0b829c4
Parameter 4 : 0x00000000
Caused By Driver : ntkrnlpa.exe
Caused By Address : ntkrnlpa.exe+819e5
File Description : NT Kernel & System
Product Name : Microsoft® Windows® Operating System
Company : Microsoft Corporation
File Version : 6.1.7601.18409 (win7sp1_gdr.140303-2144)
Processor : 32-bit
Computer Name :

MSE scored the worst (admittedly out of only 10 AV packages) according to the latest AV-Test 2014 as well (under Win7):

http://www.av-test.org/en/news/news-single-view/17-software-packages-in-a-repair-performance-test-after-malware-attacks/

First, when your computer is on your hard drive is always running. I assume you mean one of two things: 1. It spun up to full speed so you noticed it whirring away and wondered ‘what the heck?!’ 2. Or, you noticed the hard drive activity light maxing out?

The latter is typical housekeeping and should occur anytime the PC is on and you are not really doing anything that is accessing the hard drive. After a few seconds of inactivity the drive will start automatically testing sectors and moving anything it finds unstable (hopefully the latter is an infrequent occurrence) to a stable sector and marking the bad sector off (and activating a reserve sector out).

The former can be normal activity of a noisy drive or symptomatic of a drive going bad. Could be malware but I doubt it.

I suppose there is a third possibility but your PC would need to be low on memory with virtual memory swaps furiously kicking in or your hard drive is getting low on space and housekeeping is moving temp files around to the last available fragmented spaces.

I would probably test the drive first. As well as see how much free space remained (if it was fuller than you expected or the drive is reportedly smaller than expected that could be serious malware).

Then look at what the hogging activity is.

If you want to check your hard drive, go to the maker’s tech support page, downloads and download their diagnostic testing app and run it. I would not accept any offer to “fix” the drive until you backed it up (that is run it in read only mode). [If you don’t know the insides of your PC run Speccy or Belarc Advisor to determine make of your drive.]

Figure out what app is stealing your drive:
http://askleo.com/i_have_constant_disk_activity_and_i_dont_know_why_how_can_i_tell_what_program_is_doing_it/

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx – process monitor download (free)

If you want to check for malware you can run Malwarebytes Anti-Malware (free):

http://filehippo.com/download_malwarebytes_anti_malware

And boot up a Rescue disk. If you are not using AVG I rather like AVGs Rescue disk as you can download all current AV defs into memory before running upon the hard drive. [If you are using AVG as you antiviral app, then I’d try Kaspersky’s Rescue Disk.]
http://www.avg.com/us-en/download.prd-arl
http://www.avg.com/us-en/226386 – how to guide

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I noticed a couple of things, your Firefox is 5 releases out of date…currently ver 31. And you are running Word97. It is your computer but serious security concerns running out of date popular apps on an Internet connected PC. I can understand not embracing the most recent update letting others do the “beta” testing, but beyond a certain point is a vulnerability.

… I encountered a sudden BSOD. I had a bunch of websites open in Chrome (it was the only application running at the time) and I minimized the window. When I moved my mouse pointer down to the Notification Area and clicked on the Network icon, the computer immediately displayed a BSOD….I chose to start Windows normally, went into the Event Viewer and scanned the list. I found 3 red flags, ….

I would not bother. You had a lot open. Likely the memory manager had not fully released all areas of memory that had been occupied by what you shut down and something else tried to occupy the same space resulting in a BSOD. A single BSOD should not make you jump through hoops. If it happens again then yes, figure it out and correct it, but one instability in a life of use does not merit “fixing” what likely ain’t broke.

Well this fortuitously popped into my mailbox this morning and I figured I’d share. It is based upon another article he wrote that was published the same day:

XP Users Can Still Get Effective Antivirus Protection

by Neil J. Rubenking
PC Magazine
Jul 21, 2014

…. AV-Test researchers install each antivirus on a clean system and then expose that system to malware in a variety of ways. For testing, they use both very new zero-day malware and a collection of very widespread malware. Quite a few products managed 100 percent protection in both parts of this test. A few clunkers dragged down the overall average to 97 percent for zero-day samples and 98 percent for widespread samples. Microsoft Security Essentials (included as a baseline) and AhnLab both turned in scores below 80 percent protection….

[Read the complete article at this link.]

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If you take the advice from the author above I’d consider the paid versions which replace XP’s firewall as well. Of course you might want to research if the antivirus (AV) app has stated what its commitment to support XP is…some have posted they are committed to supporting XP at least until such and such a date. It would kind of suck to pay for a AV and then have it inform you a couple of months later that XP support would be ending at some eminent date.

I did get a chuckle out of the comment on Comodo’s firewall. It is a serious pain if it is not installed on a new installation of XP always popping up asking are you sure you want this or that aspect of a program numerous times. Training it is a serious problem on a present installation, but Comodo can be had for free and it works very well other than this serious irritation. On a clean install, Comodo never challenges apps installed with your permission after it has been installed and only those apps that may be present before its installation pop up and they seem to train better—train meaning after you informed Comodo’s pop up a few times it is alright Comodo ceases warning you when you work in an app. Comodo has a history of supporting long “dead” Windows OS’ (as does the free ZoneAlarm firewall).

Remember just because you are running an up to date 3rd party AV app (and maybe an up to date 3rd party firewall) currently supported for XP means you are very safe from viruses and some other forms of malware. It doesn’t mean there aren’t other attacks that can happen running XP that can occur on older equipment that lack some hardware protections, on older widely (or once widely) used apps that are no longer updated, and on that old unsupported OS (XP) you are now running. It doesn’t mean you cannot tread in shark infested water . . . just tread carefully.

One other possibility is if one partition is fairly empty and the other nearly full, some apps allow non-destructive shrinking of a mostly empty partition followed by non-destructive expanding the other.

But I don’t particularly like two or more partitions on a drive. If you can clean up the drive and then move the files off of the secondary partition over to the boot one and then kill the now empty partition and then non-destructively expand the boot partition is the way to go on IMHO.

What it means is if you are going to continue using XP, and that is still 1 in 4 Windows users, get MSE off of your OS and install a 3rd party AV app that WILL continue to support XP without playing games with you. I’d replace the firewall too. IE and Outlook Express (if using it) too.

edit: Upon rereading your original post I am understanding you are not getting a spontaneous wake event, you are getting a reboot upon initiating rewaking. That could definitely be memory. Could also be PSU (likely) or some other component. Do you have a graphics card installed (if yes, model?)? Is this waking from RAM or waking from storage drive?

While running a diagnostic memory tester is a okay first step because it is easily performed be forewarned that the app 64-bit Windows comes with is a 32-bit one and only capable of testing up to 4Gb of RAM. If you have more RAM than that you will want to boot up and use recent free 64-bit versions of either memtest86 or memtest86+.

Or remove all but 4Gb of RAM and test and then remove the RAM and swap in the other RAM and test. This is actually a better memory testing procedure because the odds of two or four sticks of RAM being bad are very remote. By running with a single stick and demonstrating the problem remains or disappears you either rule out RAM or ID the stick responsible respectively.

Sleep/wake problems are just about the most common complaints.

I would wonder how you tested your PSU? I presume the PC is not on a UPS?

My first suspicion would be your mouse. If it has become too sensitive vibration can wake the system. Turn off waking on mouse movement/clock and see if it goes away. If so, clean mouse, adjust settings or replace.

Here is a goodlist of things to try.

Look at what last waked your PC up:
Quick Guide for last wake-up (Does not show Time or Date)

1. http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/122012-lastwake-command.html

Full Guide wake-up source showing (Date and Time) in event viewer

2. http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/179257-wake-source-read-event-viewer-log.html

Hopefully this helps you whip it. If not I have a rather voluminous amount of additional possibilities. Let us know how it turns out.