Frustrating XP! XP resources?? WTH?

[shikhan]

Okay, hopefully someone can help me here. Here is a compilation of my posts on another board that ended unable to help me too much:

I've had no problems with XP for the longest time but for some reason now, it just keeps giving me the same problem over and over and thru multiple fresh installs.
Problem: after a while, nothing new will open up. I can access the start menu but clicking on anything results in no actions. Any shortcut does the same. Ctrl+alt+del results in a beep from the mobo. I am unable to access any menu functions in trillian. However, win+L works.

At the time, I had Trillian, Microsoft Excel, and Outlook express running and in the background nvidia's ndesktop, Mcafee virus scanner 6.02.1019.1, and zone alarm.

I went and shut off Excel and OE and then found everyhting works again.

I check my free ram immediatly afterwords and I had 200+ mb left. I know its not my proc becuase its a 1.33 and I've run a healluva larger load on it this before...

Anyone have any ideas?

Also, I've noticed that some programs refuse to work [Ie, crash immediatly] In every install, Download Accelerator Plus refuses to work and in this one, I've noticed that the ASPIcheck.exe fails to work as well

This is really driving me crazy. Can anyone please please help?


[grabbed from lower posts]
Hardware:
Gigabyte GA-7DXR
GeForce 3
512 ddr - 2 sticks of 256
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz
10/100 Network card
IBM 70 GB HD
WD(?) 30 GB HD
Pioneer 16x DVD
Plextor 16x

Sorry, Forgot to mention that I have full admin access. Everything ran before and then I encountered the problem and after I shut down Excel and OE they work again. BTW, I have OE and Excel open along with everythign I had open before and it runs now... the only glitch I can detect right now is upon starting a new explorer browser, for a few seconds the windows image that is generally in the square in the upper right exapnds the entire width of the window... then it goes back to what it should be in about .25 seconds... I am taking this as an indication that my XP is slowly dieing again [installed only 2-3 days ago] as I have noticed that little explorer bug thing right when my previous installs died.

Okay, I thought about hte ram being the problem and it kind of made sense to me since when things stoped loading was when i had approx 260 mb of ram left, which is almost one stick. I have two 256 ddr's in. Here are the situations that I have tried:

r1 = ram that was originally in slot 1
r2 = ram that was originally in slot 2
s1 = slot 1
s2 = slot 2
s3 = slot 3

original config:
s1 = r1
s2 = r2
s3 = none
=> problems described in first post


first try:
s1 = r1
s2 = none
s3 = non2
=> hangs on "checking DMI pool..."

second try:
s1 = r2
s2 = none
s3 = none
=> hangs on "checking DMI pool..."

third try:
s1 = r2
s2 = r1
s3 = none
=> seems to be working right now...

It seems like I was on the money when I made the relation to the 9x resource problem. I had FlashFXP open along with trillian, OE and winamp, and i double clicked one of the .fqf files and when it tried to open a new FXP and it poped up an error stating no system resources available...

Application Error
Exception EMenuError in module FlashFXP.exe at 00043B7B. out of system resources


I'm runnign the newest drivers for all hardware and actually a beta driver of the nvidia [i think i'll try an install this weekend w/ one thing at a time]

I have been thinking its a hardware problem less and less as if I do a cold boot, I can open up as much as I want and never get any problems at all. However, over time, it wont let me. Like I said before, it reminds me of win9x resources dissapearing over time. I'm scanning my system now with McAfee again to see if its a virus of some type, but I'm wondering if anyone knows of any memory leak of XP? And I tried looking up the error code but nothing matched.


Sorry for the long post but its the troubleshooting I've done to an extent so far. Any one have any ideas? I'm pretty sure its not the ram, I think. Any one know of a good way to test my hardware? I've heard of programs that can do it but I'm not sure what they are. Anyone know where the problem may be?

 

[uab101]

I used to run windows XP back in September and early October. I noticed that XP seems to drain my resources to the point that I could not get basic functionality. What I did first was replace my RAM, and it seemed to enjoy the new RAM that I installed. It work great for a couple of weeks, but I noticed that I needed to restart it everyday to get the best results. Also, I had to uninstall mcafee. It did not work well with XP. I installed Norton 2k2, and had no problems after that from XP. I officially uninstalled October 25 until SP-1. I know that this probably doesn't help u at all. But that is how I solved my problem by getting new memory(which was my excuse for getting over a gig), and norton 2k2.

 

[uab101]

BTW, a lot of programs seem not to work with XP. I got tired of waiting for new software to catch up.

 

[Nothinman]

Definately sounds like a hardware problem, bad memory, maybe heat.

Run memtest86 for a while and see if it says anything.

BTW, a lot of programs seem not to work with XP. I got tired of waiting for new software to catch up.

A lot? I've been running XP on my notebook since December and can only think of 1 program that wouldn't run on it.

 

[shikhan]

Currently I dont have a working floppy drive connected to my system so I can't run the memtest86 unless you know of a way to get it to run from a cd? Or another program which can test my ram?

 

[Nothinman]

You could make a bootabe CD from it, but I don't know if I'd trust a CD burned in your machine right now =)

 

[shikhan]

I trust my system that much at least 😛 Programs will work, just not alot of them at one time after a certain amount of time 😛

Anyways, how would I go about extracting the image from the file that I got. I've got a bin file but no cue or anything and I cna't get any of my cd-burning programs to load up just a bin file...

 

[Nothinman]

The image is a floppy image not a bin/bue, you should just be able to tell your burning software to boot with it. If it needs a floppy to read, you're screwed.