Let’s get to work. Windows XP is inviting itself on to Microsoft servers despite a fast or slow Internet connection. We’ve already seen evidence that XP is updating regardless of you having given it permission or not; nagging is triple-fold if you are running XP Service Pack 1 (10OCT06 final support day). Although Microsoft can deny it at the consumer level, computers update with little ‘hotfixes’ here and there for almost every visit to the maker’s servers.
The most infamous Hotfix bungle for us is the .NET Framework Hotfix for version 1.1 Computers that downloaded this Framework 1.1 fix later refused to Shutdown from the Start Menu forcing users to press and hold the power button on their PC’s. Uninstalling the .NET Framework 1.1 Hotfix through the Add/Remove Programs corrected this goof. Now, .NET Framework is at version 2.0.
With programming as convoluted at Windows, it’s no wonder that one thing breaks when another is fixed. If you have ever touched a carburetor for an old car, you know the experience. If Windows XP is just stopping dead and shutting off the computer, you might be in luck. One Toshiba Satellite laptop we tooled with only required a serious dusting off. The heat stored by dust captured on the main board was tripping the safety features and shutting the laptop down to avoid overheating.
The same goes for PC Desktops in houses with open windows, cats, smokers, lots of carpet, etc. The heat from the mother board can bake fine dust particles to itself. This adds up until dust is so caked on that the heat cannot escape. A temperature reading by the mother board reveals overheating and it trips the power off command. Removing this caked on crud is as easy as a can of old VCR ‘duster.’ Be prepared for a storm of nasty junk though.
If dusting your system doesn’t stop the shut down problem, you may have serious operating system problems that are best solved by a complete reformat. A shutdown can occur when Windows encounters a string of commands that make no sense to its programming. Perhaps a poorly written code is trying to write to a part of the hard drive that is inaccessible; maybe a bit of the hard drive that stored crucial data is now corrupt and, with no second choice, Windows generates a fatal system error.
If your system error results in the Blue Screen of Death, have a second party (like a smart friend, or Dinarius) copy data from your hard drive and just reformat the whole thing. Bad sectors of the hard drive will be ignored and you can return the copy of your data and reinstall the software you prefer. Thankfully, newer computers have the operating system disks built right in. There may be some [F#] key to press on starting the machine that will perform various scans and fixes right then and there within three hours or so.
If Internet Explorer is freezing and generating errors on exiting, you are well-advised to make back-ups of your valuable data as soon as possible. Internet Explorer (until the next version) is tied in too tightly with the Operating System according to critics. One can’t perform at 100% without the other. This was a fun-filled scam echoing from the days of multiple anti-trust lawsuits claiming that Microsoft was pushing out competition by enforcing a ‘monoculture’ environment of software.
Since Windows 95, it’s been true that Microsoft stuff works best with Microsoft stuff; it also holds true that nothing breaks Microsoft stuff faster than Microsoft stuff.
