XP Memory Problems and Startup Applications

-
My wife and I bought the same model computer this past summer (HP Compaq Presario, Win XP Media Center), and while I have had no problems, she seemed to have many. The first problems was that her computer seemed to lock up when accessing the Internet. After several different tries, I ended up re-imaging her computer, and that seemed to do the trick.

Within a month though, she started having memory problems: "Insufficient system resources exist to complete the requested service." After doing a bit a research, I concluded that the problem stemmed from the new multi-function HP printer we bought. HP kindly [grrr...] installs a java-based server and application to monitor the device. And because it is so important, HP installed it in the system tray upon startup, so it is always available.

Come to find out, HP has know memory leak issues with this application. And worse, it is a very difficult application to uninstall. This led me to Bleeping Computers and Startup Inspector. Startup Inspector is an application written by a young man living in London working for a travel agency. Startup Inspector makes it easy to disable any of your startup items whether in the Registry or in the Startup folder.

Bleeping Computers is a good resource to help you troubleshoot problems. What I liked most was the database of startup programs. (It appears that Startup Inspector may have something similar on the website, but there were PHP errors when I went to view it.) Bleeping Computers also has a Firefox search plugin, so you can search their database directly from Firefox.

Here is what I have concluded from this experience:
  • It is not always Microsoft's fault for failure
  • Be very leery of HP -- they have a lot of unnecessary software, both on their computers and for their printers
  • Startup Inspector or a similar program (Windows Defender works too) is a much easier way to manage startup issues that msconfig
  • Bleeping Computers is a good research resource for startup programs
  • The flexibility, and therefore usefulness of Firefox (search plugin) is proven again

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Digital Signatures in PDF Do Not Print

-
Image
Trouble getting the digital signature in a PDF to print? The solution is actually simpler than you might think. With your document open in Adobe Acrobat Reader, click File >> Print. When the Print dialog box opens, look for the "Comments and Forms:" drop-down below the Properties button, located in the upper-right. Click the drop-down and select "Document and Markups." Now print. That's all there is to it.
Read more

Referencing the value of a cell, not its formula

-
Image
In Excel, I will use formulas quite frequently for my analysis. At times I want to reference the resulting value of the formula for comparison or to feed another formula. Unfortunately, if you are doing a comparison, Excel will try to compare the formula instead of the formulas results. Well, turns out there is an easy way to correct this. If you want your formula result to be a number, then use the VALUE function. If you want the formula result to be text, use the TEXT function. Here is the syntax for each: VALUE(text) TEXT(value,format_text) -- The format_text value can be any format from the Category box on the Number tab (in the Format Cells dialog box) except General. Here is an example of each: =VALUE(MID(A2,46,FIND("&",A2)-46)) -- this actually finds a number beginning with the 46th character of a string, and continues until it finds the ampersand character. By wrapping the formula with VALUE, I can now compare the number to other numbers in my looku
Read more

CorelDRAW X4 Crash on Startup

-
I had a fresh install of CorelDRAW X4, and each time I tried to start it, it would crash. After some searching through Google, I found the following fix. Open the folder C:\Program Files\Corel\CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4\Programs\UIConfig\CorelDRAW Edit DrawUI.xml Find the line <dockpage guidref="bc1e2f70-3b58-41cd-8406-aaa550482972" visible="true" selected="true"> Change visible="false" and remove selected="true" <dockpage guidref="bc1e2f70-3b58-41cd-8406-aaa550482972" visible="false"> Save and close DrawUI.xml Fold down F8 and restart CorelDRAW X4 When prompted to update settings, select OK That did the trick for me. Apparently it is caused by a conflict with MFC dlls that are installed (version 1833) with SQL2008.
Read more