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I’ve never had a good video driver from Windows Update. Other drivers have worked fine, even fixed a problem on occasion – but don’t touch those video drivers. They always seem to lead to system instability and there always seems to be a newer one at the manufacturers website.

I’ve never had a good video driver from Windows Update. Other drivers have worked fine, even fixed a problem on occasion – but don’t touch those video drivers. They always seem to lead to system instability and there always seems to be a newer one at the manufacturers website.

Does the log show a failure for the FIRST time the patch was applied? It could be that subsequent attempts failed because the first actually succeeded. I cannot remember which patch is concerned, but there is a new one out there that reqires that you also make sure that the latest verion of windows update is required, or the patch will not register as having been applied. Worth checking.

Does the log show a failure for the FIRST time the patch was applied? It could be that subsequent attempts failed because the first actually succeeded. I cannot remember which patch is concerned, but there is a new one out there that reqires that you also make sure that the latest verion of windows update is required, or the patch will not register as having been applied. Worth checking.

If Fujitsu don’t have any diagnostics, IBM Drive Fitness works with most drives (that I have tried).

If Fujitsu don’t have any diagnostics, IBM Drive Fitness works with most drives (that I have tried).

My last conversation with HP support, over a network printer that wouldn’t accept print requests, led to being advised to reinstall the printer using generic windows drivers and a standard TCP/IP port, in place of the existing latest HP drivers and HP TCP/IP port – go figure! This seemed to work, but left me with the prospect of going round to the twenty or so users for whom that was the default printer, uninstalling and reinstalling the printer.

In fact, all it took was reconfiguring the existing printer setup at the print server to use the new TCP/IP port. All the HP person would say was that sometimes the prnter driver goes wrong: very impressive from a large company like HP. in any case, the problem was clearly actually with the port. Just glad I thought to give it a try!

My last conversation with HP support, over a network printer that wouldn’t accept print requests, led to being advised to reinstall the printer using generic windows drivers and a standard TCP/IP port, in place of the existing latest HP drivers and HP TCP/IP port – go figure! This seemed to work, but left me with the prospect of going round to the twenty or so users for whom that was the default printer, uninstalling and reinstalling the printer.

In fact, all it took was reconfiguring the existing printer setup at the print server to use the new TCP/IP port. All the HP person would say was that sometimes the prnter driver goes wrong: very impressive from a large company like HP. in any case, the problem was clearly actually with the port. Just glad I thought to give it a try!

Alt + Print Screen to copy the active window, then paste to desired location.

What icon does the shortcut have? Is it the Internet Explorer icon? If you right-click the icon and select properties, what is it showing?

I gave up trying to make a living building and servicing PC’s and went into Network Support because there was no way I could compete with the price of machines like that. Most potential customers have no understanding of the differences between memory types, etc. They just look at the headline figures, see it comes from a big chain/brand and assume it must be good.

Does the connection actually seem to be noticeably slower? The difference could be just one of accuracy in reporting the connection speed. In any case, it does seem a little slow. There are a few things you can try to improve things:

1) The further the modem is from the master socket (the first socket from the Telco’s feed, from which all the others chain), the worse the connection speed will be.
2) Long extensions reduce the signal strength and so the connection speed.
3) The more phones you have, the weaker the signal will get. If you have recently added another phone, that could have caused the drop-off.
4) Noise on the line, particularly noticeable in more rural areas, reduces connection speed and can cause disconnections. There are fairly inexpensive filters you can get to clean up the line signal.

Finally, I have found that I get a significantly better connection using my external USRobotics serial modem, than with any internal modem I have tried.

Excellent. The lack of msconfig has been totally frustrating, especially as my Win2k machine is currently the only one working. At least now I can tweak a little more performance out of it.

The amount of RAM would be the my first check. XP claims to work on 128MB, but not in any way that I would find acceptable. I am about to replace a PC for a user that she complained about the speed of, swapping a 2.0GHz P4 256MB RAM for a 2.53MHz, 512MB DDR machine. Admittedly, there were some other issues, like her turning the PC off over the weekends, when all our workstations are scheduled to defragment their hard drives.

Once you start adding apps and with office workers running multiple windows, I think 512MB RAM is a minimum and preferably DDR RAM.

I would also look under ‘Add/Remove programs’ for Hotfix Q811493. I have sped up several machines by removing that one. Regular defragmentation (eg weekly) will also help.

I know that was recommended for NT, but I thought a minimum equal to RAM and a max of 1.5 times was enough for XP, since it does a better job of managing memory. Probably a moot point if you have plenty of disc space, but I had to reset the virtual memory on a machine (20GB HDD) recently to free up some urgently needed slack on the C: drive, to allow defragmentation.