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baby/bathwater PC problem

Given behavior described below, Is reformatting the entire computer a good idea?

  • No way, the tech guy is on on crack

    Votes: 11 29.7%

  • Yeah, bite the bullet. It's the best solution

    Votes: 6 16.2%

  • No, I think your problem really is....(details below)

    Votes: 4 10.8%

  • On Planet X, Windows does not exist, and life is good.

    Votes: 16 43.2%
  • Total voters
    37
  • Poll closed .

bug_girl

Master Poster
B
Joined
Nov 30, 2003
Messages
2,994
Hi all. I want to get confirmation of a hunch.
I am forced to use a PC laptop at work, and it's begun having some hiccups. When I'm running one of the MS Office programs (excel, word, outlook), they will occasionally give me the "not responding" message.
After some experimenting, I discovered that if I just wait one minute, the program recovers and continues just fine. Wierd. Annoying.

I report this to our tech guys, and they say they want to reformat my entire laptop, wipe it, and reinstall everything. :eye-poppi :jaw-dropp :eek:

That seems awfully extreme. I haven't even had this computer for a year. Additionally, I will have to find and reinstall at least 10 other programs, from SPSS to our web logging software. Big pain in the *** for me.

My sense is that our guys don't really know what's wrong, and are just reformatting to fix it with brute force. Your opinions?
 
Windows XP
Outlook 2003
word and Excel 11.0
Service Pack 2 installed

Dell Latitude D610, 1.7Ghz, 1GB ram

They made me turn windows defender on--and then off again. No difference.
 
Last edited:
bug_girl said:
Hi all. I want to get confirmation of a hunch.
I am forced to use a PC laptop at work, and it's begun having some hiccups. When I'm running one of the MS Office programs (excel, word, outlook), they will occasionally give me the "not responding" message.
After some experimenting, I discovered that if I just wait one minute, the program recovers and continues just fine. Wierd. Annoying.

I report this to our tech guys, and they say they want to reformat my entire laptop, wipe it, and reinstall everything. :eye-poppi :jaw-dropp :eek:

That seems awfully extreme. I haven't even had this computer for a year. Additionally, I will have to find and reinstall at least 10 other programs, from SPSS to our web logging software. Big pain in the *** for me.

My sense is that our guys don't really know what's wrong, and are just reformatting to fix it with brute force. Your opinions?
Click to expand...

That'd be my guess. That and a lack of desire to actually find out what is wrong.

I do this stuff all the time, and I usually find that taking the time to learn the cause of a problem saves me time in the long run. Blowing it off and starting from scratch is an easy "fix" for the guy who doesn't have to reinstall the software afterwards. For the person who has to make it all work again, it is not such an easy fix.

If I burn one of ours off, I end up with a minimum of an hour's work putting things back on aftwerwards. If I fix the problem, I might spend that hour (maybe even two) finding the cause - and then only five minutes fixing it. The next time I have the same problem, it only takes me the five minutes to fix it.

As for what is wrong with your PC, I don't know. There are too many possibilities to try guessing.
 
Have you ever taken the laptop home. If so, do you know where your new hamster is?
 
Arkan_Wolfshade said:
http://support.microsoft.com/search/default.aspx?catalog=LCID%3D1033&spid=2520&query=not+responding&adv=&mode=r&cat=False

Now this one http://support.microsoft.com/kb/313937/en-us popped in my specifically, because we used to have trouble with this at my previous employer.
Click to expand...
And the length of the list shows you what I mean about trying to guess. It is also possible that the freeze is not an MS problem at all, but that something else on the PC is causing the problems - viruses and such come to mind, as do a bad drive and a bad network connection. Maybe one of the other programs on the machine has an autoupdate feature that kicks in and ties up resources.
 
*agree MortFurd*

Is the helldesk tech's suggestion legit, yes. There is a fair chance that the work to wipe and reinstall the system will be less than trying to diagnose the problem and fixing the root cause. It is the right thing to do, that's more of a call for your IT dept and management, which have to balance costs. :( sorry I'm not more helpful. Having been, and continue to be, on both sides of this equation, it sucks.
 
Outlook has an option where you can automatically keep a history of when your Excel and Word files were last edited, called Journal. I have seen this service slow Excel and Word to a crawl.

To see if your journal is active, enter Outlook and go:

Tools --> Options --> Preferences tab --> Journal Options

If "Also record files from:" has checkmarks next to the programs that are slow, you can try clearing them.
 
Whoops.

I'm not going along with the guys from the helldesk. They are taking the easy way out. They don't (from the OP) have the task of putting things back together after reinstalling Windows. They'll do their job and have a finished task, but leave bug_girl holding the bag on getting things straightened out for use again. Not cool at ALL.

With access to the machine, you can do a lot to determine the cause and fix it without the pain of a reinstallation orgy.

This is why I fix problems instead of blowing things off and starting from scratch. Assume I use the image made 1 month ago in restoring the system. Any new software installed in that month is gone. All tweaks made by the user are gone. I get to setup the printer stuff again, and setup an Outlook profile again. If any of the software uses copy protection schemes, I get to go through the relicensing process for each program. Some programs have to be uninstalled before the reformat, else I get to write a tiresome message to the manufacturer and wait for a replacement license to be sent via US Snail.

Now imagine that your helldesk guys are only responsible for "reinstall the image," and that your users are left with the rest of the crap. Not funny at all.

I find it faster to find the cause and fix the problem than to blow it off and start from scratch. My exeperience, anyway.
 
Personally, I think it depends a lot on the problem. A little more research into it would probably tell your IT guys whether or not reformatting is really a good idea. Normally I reserve that for a last resort. Like others have mentioned here, check the settings they've recommended to see if maybe something in there is slowing you down, though if this has just started recently, I'd be more keen to suspect an updated driver, or newly installed program. Run an up to date Virus and Spyware scanner, just to be sure, then if it where me, I'd start thinking back to when the problem started and start removing programs installed since then, and rolling back drivers. In a real pinch, you can try reinstalling windows (without formatting!) though that tends to be hit and miss.
I'd reserve reformatting for until I'm sure it's a problem with the system files/registry that can't be fixed by restoring a registry image.

I'd agree with you about your tech guys, they either have a pile of computers and just want a quick, in/fix/out solution, or they just want to get back to world of warcraft asap :D
 
Seems lazy to me as well. On larger enterprise sites they might have periodic images of individual PC's, or have a global image that is used, or be using a product like Altiris or somesuch and can do a rebuild without any real observable effect on the user.

However, as they mention formating and reinstalling everything it sounds as though they do everything there manually. In which case, their being lazy.

There are Service Packs for Office as well as Windows. It would be worthwhile ensuring your Office (if it's 2003) has SP2 installed, as well as WinXP SP2.

There are lots of options with Office as well. You can repair an install, do an uninstall and reinstall, which with Office 2003 usually keeps your Office settings and Outlook profile. They should look to see if there are scheduled local virus scans that could be running during the day.

Either way there is a short list of rather easy things to check, that do not require large amounts of time, that might discover the problem, and would save them the work of reloading everything.

I find that very rarely do I have to go far enough as to actually rebuild a PC.

But as mentioned, sometime management has IT policies in place that make that investment of time a no-no.
 
bug_girl said:
Hi all. I want to get confirmation of a hunch.
I am forced to use a PC laptop at work, and it's begun having some hiccups. When I'm running one of the MS Office programs (excel, word, outlook), they will occasionally give me the "not responding" message.
After some experimenting, I discovered that if I just wait one minute, the program recovers and continues just fine. Wierd. Annoying.

I report this to our tech guys, and they say they want to reformat my entire laptop, wipe it, and reinstall everything. :eye-poppi :jaw-dropp :eek:

That seems awfully extreme. I haven't even had this computer for a year. Additionally, I will have to find and reinstall at least 10 other programs, from SPSS to our web logging software. Big pain in the *** for me.

My sense is that our guys don't really know what's wrong, and are just reformatting to fix it with brute force. Your opinions?
Click to expand...
I have had similar problems. I traced it to AIM. The two most recent versions of AOL Instant Messenger played hell with my MS Office apps. when I uninstalled AIM everything worked just fine.
 
Interestingly, the only software or "new" thing since the problem started is Windows Defender, which has since been turned off. I also got some strange windows registry messages when I tried to install updates.
:(
I have a bad, bad feeling it will turn out to be a windows problem :(

I'm not the only one having the problem, either--it just seems to be worse for me, probably because i'm a power user, and have my hands on the keyboard 24/7.

Thanks guys--this gives me some things to try before I have to give up and start rooting around for all the original software disks, and try to find some of my shareware again.
 
Hmm, if it's spread around the office, then I'd suspect either a virus, adware, or a corporate program. If so, I highly doubt formatting and reinstalling would help for more than a few days/weeks before the issue resurfaced...
 
bug_girl said:
Interestingly, the only software or "new" thing since the problem started is Windows Defender, which has since been turned off. I also got some strange windows registry messages when I tried to install updates.
Click to expand...
I assume Windows Defender is AV or similar. I'd put money on it being the problem. Your Office programs are probably grinding to a halt while it scans some disk activity or something.

Yes, it might say it's been turned off, but it could be lying. The only way to be certain is to uninstall Windows Defender completely and see if the problem still happens.
 
Windows Defender is a spyware/malware scanner from Microsoft. I use it extensively on large sites and found its scans to run quite resource light in the background. I'd be a little surprised if Defender was bogging down the machine.

Recently, Microsoft released Windows Defender Final. It was still partially a beta product previous to that. They created a cut-off date at which point the Windows Defender Beta service no longer starts, even when set to automatic. You were essentially forced to install Defender Final. This does cause an error message on startup.

Go to Start - Run and enter services.msc. Look for the Windows Defender service. If it is not started, or disabled, then you know for certain Defender is not running.

You're company will be using a different product for Anti-virus. Trend or Symantec most likely. They often have scheduled or startup scans that can hog cpu time and memory and bog down a machine, Symantec in particular.

All that being said, uninstall Defender is competely painless. Uninstall and reinstall if need be, it only takes a minute or two to install.
 
Buggy, have you noticed: When your PC goes into one of these extended sleepy-byes, is the hard disk access light stay on at the same time? Can you hear the hard disk accessing a lot in that period? (It will be sort of lightly buzzing in a laptop situation.)
 
My first diagnostic thing would be to start in safe mode (with network support) and see if you can replicate the problem there. If you can't then it's something in the background (I had a similar problem that was due to a useless file loaded by my Logitech mouse drivers).

Pull up task manager and start knocking processes out, starting with the ones assisgned to your user name, if that works then search for the file and find out what it's associated with - either from it's location on the hard drive or Googling.

If it's happening in safe mode then it's probably more efficient in terms of time to blat the disk and re-install. Yes the problem could be found and tracked down but they could easily take a day or more to sort it whereas a new version of Windows + Software install will be a lot quicker
 
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