Help! My Computer is Acting up and There's no Tech Person Around.
When you send a mail message, look at a web site, etc your request doesn't
go directly from your machine to the place you want to go. The ethernet
cable attached to your machine goes into the wall, through several more
feet of cable to a switch, etc. Most of the time this works pretty well.
However if there are network repairs being done on campus getting your
request out can be rather like narrowing six lanes of rush hour traffic
down to a single lane. It just takes awhile. Be patient. Give it a few
minutes and try again.
You can look at the CISGrapevine
to see if there are repairs scheduled. Unscheduled or emergency repairs
will not be listed. You can also call the CIS Helpdesk at 744-7836 and
ask them if there are network problems on campus. Chances if you're having
trouble connecting and the folks in the offices around you are also it's
a network problem.
If the problem persists or you receive an odd error message, email the
error message to sysmgr at math.okstate.edu
Windows operating systems are notorious for locking up, spitting out error
messages about illegal operations, etc. It's just one of those undocumented
features.
It's not necessarily an indication that there is something wrong with your
PC. If it locks up, the cursor freezes, etc you can use ctrl
+ alt + delete to find the stuck process and attempt to kill it off.
Sometimes the only way you can fix it is to reboot your PC.
If rebooting does not solve the problem, you may have acquired some ghosts.
This is another on of those Windows features. If you want to try
ghostbusting yourself here's how:
-
Reboot your PC. After the system has found all it's hardware and before
you see the loading Windows screen (the blue sky with clouds one) press
the F8 key. You may need to try this a couple times to get the timing
right.
-
You should see a black screen with several boot options listed in white.
Select the Safe Mode option.
-
Safe Mode uses a low video resolution so when it boots up all your icons
will be enormous and may be all jumbled up.
-
Go to the My Computer icon and then into your Control Panel.
Once youre in the control panel folder select the System icon. From
the System Properties, click on the Device Manager folder.
You'll see a list of icons that represent parts of your PC with a plus
sign next to them.
-
Go through the list, clicking on the plus signs to expand each category.
Ignore the System devices icon at the bottom of the
lists. What you're looking for are multiple listing for the same device.
If you know your PC only has one cdrom drive and when you expand the cdrom
list there are two listed....that's ghosting.
-
If you find multiple listing for any devices, remove all the listing for
that device. Hightlight the device and them click on the Remove
button at the bottom of the page.
-
Once you have all the ghosts removed reboot your PC. As it comes up you'll
see messages about it locating the device that you removed. The operating
system will them add those devices back in correctly
There are a couple other things to look at if your PC is running slowly.
On your C drive, in the Windows folder there are two
temporary file folders: Temp and Temporary Internet Files.
If these directories are full that can take up alot of hard drive space
and slow down the machine. You can use ctrl + a to select all
the files in a folder and delete them.
It's also possible that your hard drive has a hight percentage of fragmentation.
If you go to the Start menu, then to Programs and Accessories
you'll find a System Tools menu. Select the Disk Defragmentor
tool.
After you select a drive to defrag, the tool will let you know what percentange
of your disk is fragemented. If it's more than 10% ior more t's worth defraging.
If you're using a screen saver shut if off before you start the defrag
process. Defragging a drive can take a long time depending on the size
of your drive and how fragmented it is. This is a good process to start
before you leave for the day.
If your x-terminal locks up your best bet is to reboot it. If you aren't
able to shut down the window manager, etc before you shut the terminal
down you'll still have processes running the server. When your terminal
comes back up and you've logged in you can locate and remove those processes
with ps aux | grep your_username. This will show you all
the processes running that you own. You can remove them using kill
-9 process_id_number.
It's a good idea to do this before you start up X again and finish logging
in. If you don't you'll probably get error messages when you try
to start programs like Netscape and Pine.
If you attempt to reboot your X-terminal and your terminal is
unable to contact to the boot server this is probably a network problem.
Wait a few minutes and try it again. If the problem persists, contact the
system administrator.
Here are some links that may be useful for PC trouble
shooting:
To buy Hardware or Software
A few good places to download software:
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This page was last updated on February 5, 2003. Questions, suggestions,
and general grumpings should be sent to
webmaster at math.okstate.edu.