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Help! My computer won't shut down!

08:38 / 26.08.02

It won't.

It displays the "windows shutting down" screen and then just freezes.. so I don't know what to do except just press restart and leave it on..

er..help?

(oh for the good old day when you'd just press the 'off' button and it would turn off..)

The Return Of Rothkoid

09:09 / 26.08.02

Could be some kind of hard disk problem. Make sure you run Scandisk relatively regularly. Failing that, just turn hoold down the off key - shouldn't that work? Does with my laptop...

09:40 / 26.08.02

Mine used to have that problem, but only because I went and fooled around with changing the shutdown screens. As long as it sounds like it's shut down you should be fine to turn it off. You may have just accidentaly deleted the 'shut off' screen like I did.

13:24 / 26.08.02

You have Norton Utilities? Fixes little abberations in most systems.

Which also makes me think...we all interface here via the ol' electronic heap we call the computer. If it's your home system, how often to do you work on maintaining it? I clean mine probably once a week. It only crashes when I ask it to do something obscene and I see it coming. Maintainance be important...

13:36 / 26.08.02

What do you do for maintenance, do you have a set routine?

When I first got my laptop, I intended to be good about maintenance. But you know, whenever I ran ScanDisk --I feel like the person who thought the CD-ROM drive was a cup holder asking this-- it would start & then if the computer *did* anything --like if the cursor moved, or if I nudged it, or sometimes invisible stuff that I don't know what-- then ScanDisk would start over from the beginning. I set the Scheduled Tasks thingy to run in the middle of the night & in the morning, it still wouldn't have gotten through a complete run. What am I doing wrong?

13:41 / 26.08.02

My computer did that for a while. The off button worked. I'm running 98, and though it was a pain, I went through the instructions outlined in the help file on the subject and it actually worked. Shocked the hell outta me. (For the record, while this post sounds sarcastic, I'm really, truly not being sarcastic.)

13:50 / 26.08.02

My computer does that, too. The shut-down screen is accompanied by a sound file that is, apparently, very delicate. If the sound file breaks, it locks up the whole shutting-down-cruft. I don't know if this suits your problem exactly, but here's some info about troubleshooting Windows 98's shutdown procedures.

Your computer has finished its laundry, though, you should be able to just cut the power.

15:44 / 26.08.02

I clean mine probably once a week. It only crashes when I ask it to do something obscene and I see it coming. Maintainance be important...

Good question.

I have Linux. I don't need to clean it. (Only if I want to free up some disc space.) It doesn't get less and less reliable as time goes on, like Windows does, and it almost never crashes, programs sometimes crash but they don't take the whole OS down with them.

I used to use Windows 98 but it is widely known, even amongst Windows enthusiasts, to be crap. I had constant problems booting up (usually, it would check memory, be about to load, and then, er, start all over again, or just hang on the startup screen). Even after I deleted the whole lot and repartitioned, it still does that.

Windows having problems on startup/shutdown is particularly bad because the standard means of fixing a problem with a Windows program is, er, to reboot. If you can't do that well you've lost pretty much your main tool.

Anyway, these were some of the reasons that I switched to Linux, Mandrake 8.2 if you're interested, and I never want to use Windows at home again. I have to say, though, that even though they're trying to make it user-friendly, if I wasn't a geek and had no geek friends I would have been utterly lost.

15:58 / 26.08.02

I run a Mac so most of my tools don't apply to the majority of users out there. Yes 98 does have problems. I hear the 2000 is rock-solid though. My friend might have crashed once on it over a year's time.

On the Mac side though. I rebuild the desktop once a week. Run Norton Disk Doctor and Speed Disk (the defrag utility) about as often. Also, running memory hungry apps all of the time can get your system in a jumble if you don't restart it every so often. I've noticed problems on my beast when I run say IE and Outlook, and then run Illustrator or Flash while having a ton of fonts to access.

Up into just recently due to a disk failing, had my system disk running on a seperate drive while the other disk was split in two (partitions). One side for applications and the other for files. It seems that keeping different resources from getting jumbled together helps.

I'm also very strict in the designer sense when it comes to my computer (see:anal), so I put things where they should be and file accordingly. I doubt there's a file on my computer that I don't have under control.

16:34 / 26.08.02

Fridge, I'm not a geek, only have a few geek acquaintences, and tend to inherit my computers so I haven't ever been able to choose what OS I wanted. I could install it now, but all of my work and ill-gotten software is for PC. If I am able to wrap my head around an open source OS, can I still use that stuff?

16:59 / 26.08.02

It depends on what format the work is; if it's sound, images, spreadsheets, text, HTML, you'll still be able to use them fine, though the packages will be different. Some windows packages you can use Wine (a windows emulator) to run. Also, if you have a windows partition and a linux partition you can just reboot if there's a sudden need to use windows.

I think it's quite possible to use Linux if you're not a geek, but the learning curve is going to be quite steep. If you've not got geekish tendencies and don't have geek friends to sort things out, you'd probably find it very tiresome and frustrating to start off with. But at least, though, you end up learning a lot of very useful stuff, and if there's a problem there's almost always a solution that you can work out - it's not just a black box, like windows is from the perspective of almost all users. In that sense it's actually more user-friendly. And the linux community is extremely helpful - you can ask questions in all sorts of places and get very quick answers.

Tryphena Absent

17:13 / 26.08.02

This is ridiculously simple but I didn't work it out for a few days. If I leave the little songspy icon open in the taskbar my laptop will not shut down... AIM, messenger, kazaa: all fine but songspy just screws the whole shutting down thing up completely.

20:08 / 26.08.02

thanks for all the advise etc.

I'm going to go fuck with my computer now, see if I can sort it out. (when will you learn! Technology doesn't respond well to threats and physical brutality!)

Actually, sorry for starting this thread, it's a pretty dull subject really..

The Return Of Rothkoid

22:51 / 26.08.02

Persephone: you might want to make sure that you've got no other programs open while running it. Check out the system tray (where the clock is) and see what's open - right-click and see what you can turn off there. Something that's still running and makes changes/saves to the disc is the most likely reason for scandisk to start again.

more later, maybe.

23:42 / 26.08.02

Physical brutality's worked wonders for me in the past, Riz. Very bad for doing stuff I shouldn't when it comes to my hardware, yet I've never had any real problems.

*boots case to hush noisy fan* Isn't that right, pooter?

ONLY NICE THINGS

00:00 / 27.08.02

Maybe it just wants to watch you sleep...