XP and monitor oddity

[catgate]

A friend in the village was quizzing me about a problem he has, and of course being the luddite I am my knowledge of XP is virtually nil. I strongly suspect it is nothing to do with XP, but some wise WF member may have some inkling of the cause.

Apparently on shut down, at the point where the user is asked if he really does want to shut down, or to restart, or to cancel, half a dozen vertical lines appear on the screen. He also thinks it is a little slower than it used to be (his HD is apparently filling up nicely)

The machine is not a proprietary one and as yet I am not sure what the exact spec. is. He is currently doing the clean up, defrag, swill out and sweep up CrapCleaner etc. routine. He left here this morning with an eight year old Video card to try, since that was about the only thing that seemed to spring to my cerebral putty.

I am hoping that it might just respond to the cleaning up, but a suggestion or two might help..please.

[Boris]

Is it a TFT or CRT monitor ?

[-pops-]

You state the HDD is filling up - how full is it and what is the capacity?

I used to work on the principle (in the days of 40GB drives and less) that the "C" drive should not be more than half full. This was to allow Windows to be able to do its work juggling the data around. This is not so important in these days of very large HDDs but, even so, there ought to be a quantity of GBs available for this to take place.

[Boris]

You need at least 15% of the H/D (with Windows on it) to be free for things to work OK :)

[catgate]

Thanks for the replies so far, chaps.

The reason I was less than precise about the HD "fullness" was because I do not know exactly, and neither did he. It is a 60Gb drive and it has not been defragged or tidied up since new. I do not know how much is allocated to SWAP file use either (is this user definable, as it is in W98?) It may be full of cookies and things.

My original thought was somehow leaning towards HD but the thing that puzzled me somewhat was the timing of this occurrence i.e .why he did not get odd things occurring at times other than shut down.

With luck I shall talk to him tomorrow and find out what he has done and if a tidy up has helped.

Oh yes, Boris, it is a CRT monitor (breed unknown to me).

[ɹəuəllıʍ ʇɐb]

The swap file is now called page file, and the (min & max) size can be specified as in Win9x.

I recommend to give the HD a good cleaning with CCleaner, then run a defrag on it. Windows' native defragger will take a very long time; there are lots of free defragg(l)ers available, e.g. Diskeeper Lite. Google will find download locations.

[catgate]

Thanks for that Pat.

[catgate]

I had a 'phone call earlier to say that the problem is not now totally confined to shut down, and despite doing a defrag. and a CC run the machine is now giving a variety of error messages at times when activity is high. He has tinkered with the RAM and has convinced himself that is OK. He is now thinking it may be a tired CPU and is talking of getting a laptop.

Chaqun a son gout.