(Sorry for the long explanation. I've tried to give as much info as possible.)
When I got this laptop from a JUB friend, it had 'Desktop Maestro' on it. It was sort of a Norton Utilities-type program. After a few months, I got a notice from the friend that Desktop Maestro had been replaced by a program called PC Tools. It was recommended that I uninstall DM and download and install PC Tools.
I did, and it worked wonderfully.
Then I got an update notice Email forwarded to me from the friend and I installed the update. It did a sort of website preview of virtually everything on a browser page and allocated a 'safety level' to everything with (if I remember correctly) green, yellow, and red lights. That became a real pain in the ass and started screwing around with the internet and bogged down the laptop so much that I uninstalled it the very same day that I installed it.
Since that day, weird things have been happening with great regularity.
Every morning, after boot-up, surfing is fine for the first while (about 1/2 hour or so), then loading of a page becomes very jerky. The little spinning circle of dots comes to a complete halt for up to 15 seconds or more, then will spin for a few seconds and stop again.
At that time, surfing becomes impossible and I have to reboot.
However, when I click 'Restart', the Desktop fades out and a notice appears that Windows is waiting for 'explorer(dot)exe' to shut down. After that eventually happens, I would get the 'Logging Out' screen and then the 'Shutting Down' screen.
And then it won't shut down. The cursor spins and the hard drive light flashes, but nothing happens. I left it for 3 hours one morning and it still wouldn't shut down. The only way out is to turn off the power.
This is still happening unless I catch it at the proper moment and reboot it before it gets locked in the loop. If I do it too soon, it still happens after I restart it.
Lately, though, there have been a few times when it won't even go into shut-down mode. It just sits there showing the desktop and I have to cold boot. On my old system, Windows 98 would do a system scan on restart, but the laptop doesn't do that and my only options are to start up in Safe Mode or to start up normally. I start up normally because I can't find anything to do in Safe Mode.
After I get the laptop up and running again, it works fine for the rest of the day until I shut it down at night.
Any idea what is going on and what I can do to fix it? I don't like the idea of leaving it running all night and putting it in sleep mode is a waste of time because it wakes up shortly after midnight to do scheduled updates and downloads.
I'm seriously afraid that it's going to go down one of these days and not be able to get back up again.
When I got this laptop from a JUB friend, it had 'Desktop Maestro' on it. It was sort of a Norton Utilities-type program. After a few months, I got a notice from the friend that Desktop Maestro had been replaced by a program called PC Tools. It was recommended that I uninstall DM and download and install PC Tools.
I did, and it worked wonderfully.
Then I got an update notice Email forwarded to me from the friend and I installed the update. It did a sort of website preview of virtually everything on a browser page and allocated a 'safety level' to everything with (if I remember correctly) green, yellow, and red lights. That became a real pain in the ass and started screwing around with the internet and bogged down the laptop so much that I uninstalled it the very same day that I installed it.
Since that day, weird things have been happening with great regularity.
Every morning, after boot-up, surfing is fine for the first while (about 1/2 hour or so), then loading of a page becomes very jerky. The little spinning circle of dots comes to a complete halt for up to 15 seconds or more, then will spin for a few seconds and stop again.
At that time, surfing becomes impossible and I have to reboot.
However, when I click 'Restart', the Desktop fades out and a notice appears that Windows is waiting for 'explorer(dot)exe' to shut down. After that eventually happens, I would get the 'Logging Out' screen and then the 'Shutting Down' screen.
And then it won't shut down. The cursor spins and the hard drive light flashes, but nothing happens. I left it for 3 hours one morning and it still wouldn't shut down. The only way out is to turn off the power.
This is still happening unless I catch it at the proper moment and reboot it before it gets locked in the loop. If I do it too soon, it still happens after I restart it.
Lately, though, there have been a few times when it won't even go into shut-down mode. It just sits there showing the desktop and I have to cold boot. On my old system, Windows 98 would do a system scan on restart, but the laptop doesn't do that and my only options are to start up in Safe Mode or to start up normally. I start up normally because I can't find anything to do in Safe Mode.
After I get the laptop up and running again, it works fine for the rest of the day until I shut it down at night.
Any idea what is going on and what I can do to fix it? I don't like the idea of leaving it running all night and putting it in sleep mode is a waste of time because it wakes up shortly after midnight to do scheduled updates and downloads.
I'm seriously afraid that it's going to go down one of these days and not be able to get back up again.
