Now i think i am quite good with Computers, as i spend all day working and repairing them BUT todays problem is a good one i may have to look at tomorrow AGAIN, even though i have just spent 2 hours sorting it out (so i thought)
My sister has a PC with XP running on it at her home. She rang me to say when it boots, it gets to the select user screen, but when you select someone it just sits there, shows egg timer for a bit, then nothing, just stays where it is. It will not let you go past there
She brought the base unit to me today. I managed to get it to boot past there BUT very, very slowly. She had not run a disk clean ever and it had just about 2gb of rubbish on there which i got rid of.
Anyway, after that i downloaded CCleaner & Auslogics Disk Defragmenter so she could run these 2 great programs every so often.
I connected it to my cable, booted it up and logged in as normal, it was fine, just a bit slow if anything, but she does not have much RAM so thats ok.
It worked fine......Now she has taken it home, plugged it in, AND it stuck in exactly the same place. It will not let her get past that select user screen (With or without cable connected).
Problem............Why is it doing it over her house and not here ???
MadMonkey: The only thing that quickly comes to mind is some sort of device hooked to the PC is causing it to hang.
As a side note, I just troubleshot a laptop which about every 2 of 3 bootup would hang as it was initializing it. Found the problem to be a newer USB thumb drive that he kept attached to the laptop. He actually had 2 attached - the older one never caused a problem, but with the newer one attached, the bootup process would just hang. Now he just waits until windows boots up before plugging it in.... and remembering to remove it before next bootup.
coan.net: Snap, thats the only conclusion i could come up with, thats why i told her to unplug the Ethernet cable. The only other thing she has is a printer, just waiting for her to call back. Crazy things these PC's
diogenysos: Well i think we have found the problem It seems if she boots without her printer connected, its fine (but still slow), but why the printer should be causing a problem i do not know Anyway, i have to go to hers to sort a few things today, so i will have another look