Trippy

Hi Ken Many thanks for your response. No, the original OS was XP Pro. I had to upgrade the BIOS to run W7 (the upgrade was to allow the machine to run VISTA but works for it's later incarnation) The laptop, and several other identical units, have run reliably for 18 months or more just this one (that I'm using now) has developed the looped high CPU problem. I'm sure someone with better debugging abilities than me (and that's not hard!) could sort it relatively quickly. Some of the stuff I have read and tried is really beyond my limited knowledge.I If all else fails I can simply format the drive and do a reinstall but I'm a pedantic b*gger and like to get to the bottom of problems such as this! Thanks and kind regards Trippy

Many thanks, Nev. I have tried a few suggestions but still cannot identify the culprit that is exciting wmiprvse.exe. I can currently use a workaround by suspending the process thereby getting the processor overhead back to around 10% making the system perfectly usable.

Nightslicer, I've been fiddling with and upgrading old stuff for years! Sometimes it works but you have to know what you want to do with the end result! If you are after a machine that will run games at a reasonable speed and resolution then (IMHO) KenB is absolutely right. An old nail boosted is not for you. If you want a word processor/spreadsheet and browser, plus something that will run some older games, then with a few tweaks and a new OS it will probably suit for several years. I just bought my younger son a desktop far in excess of his college needs just so he can game and use flight simulators. I 'inherited' his old (Dell) desktop and am about to use it to replace a Dell unit from 2002 (flippin' heck that's ten years old!) that I have upgraded several times to it's max. That's all I need. Horses for courses etc. Trippy

Hello everyone and happy New Year. I haven't posted for ages as 'day job' and volunteer activities take much of my waking time. I have been (sucessfully) running some older recycled laptops using W7 for volunter activities but one has slowed to almost unusable due to wmiprvse hogging 90% of the processor time. I have tried to find the culprit by running traces but cannot generate or read a logfile (I'm crap with advanced stuff). If I suspend the process everything seems to work fine. I have uninstalled anything I don't need or use but the problem still exists. Something must be creating a looped request or similar? I have current McAfee AV licensed software and have used the trusty Malwarebytes software for many years so I'm fairly sure it's not a virus or malware. As ever, any advice gratefully received. Regards Trippy

Sounds interesting DH! Probably just what I need for my household. I'm off out just now (BBQ at Brother-in-Law's ) Can I pick your brains sometime please? Trippy:)

Absolutely right DH! I have my daughter's GCSE stuff in four different places, just not mine................ Got caught out being complacent and not doing what I tell others to do! I have some of the files on DVD but not all. My favourite line is "the only certain thing about a hard drive is that it will eventually fail" although in my experience they either go pop in the first few hours of operation, or last until you need something bigger!

Hi Nev The unit is an external 1Tb USB Hitachi Simple Drive. As I mentioned it's under warranty and will be replaced but I would like to recover whatever I can from the disk. The irony is that it is (was :( ) a backup drive. I had backed up a load of files including the 'windows.old' folder generated when installing W7 when I upgraded one of my family desktop units. "I must get around to restoring that soon in case anything goes wrong" I thought. I was 'going to' select what I wanted to keep and copy it back to the internal drives. I didn't do it quickly enough. I know at my age I should know better (and have more than one copy) but I didn't and now I may pay the price. Lesson here is to backup your backups. My excuse was that I didn't have the time. It's going to cost me a lot more time and probably money to get this back now.

Hello all Does anyone have any experience with recovering data from failed HDD? Either by using proprietry software or a third party supplier? I have a failed (CRC error) 1Tb Hitachi USB drive that has a load of stuff on that I would rather not lose. The drive is less than a year old but my experience is they either work for ages or fail fairly soon like this one. It's under warranty so I can get an RMA replacement but obviously I'd like to recover what I can before sending it back. Any advice/previous experiences gratefully received :)

From my (very recent) experience here, the Techs here are knowledgeable and friendly. If you feel the need for 'flying lessons' I'm sure the guys and gals here can get you back to earth! Trippy ;)

Hi Tootech - sorry tried that already but Vista won't let me format the drive or delete the partition. Tried similar with admin privs in the C:\ prompt but no joy. Whilst I can see how novices (just like me) used to be able to trash a PC hard drive in DOS by using the wrong commands, I don't understand ( A Bear with very little brain....!) why, as a computer administrator, I can't nuke the flipping drive if I so wish! Trippy:confused:

Still struggling with this one :( I have created a super admin account and tried deleting the contents of the drive first but even at this 'elevated' level Vista tells me I don't have permission! Now If I knew who to ask for permission that would be good but I thought it was my PC :D. Any ideas please folks? Trippy

I have a D88 that I use compatibles in. Apart from the YOU ARE USING NON EPSON INK blah blah WARRANTY blah blah; I've never had any problems, apart from clicking the continue box. Well worth the hassle when you consider that a complete set of original ink is almost the same as the cost of a new ink jet! Trippy

Right - last post in this topic - I promise :rolleyes: I'm using the box to post this now and its faster than a much higher spec machine downstairs running XP media centre. I realise that's mainly because this one is still 'squeaky clean' and the XP box, although well cleaned and maintained, hasn't had a reformat since I bought it in 2006. New HDD is working fine and I now need to reformat the original EIDE drive (D:\) that was the primary boot. Vista won't (understandably) let you just right click the drive and format it as it has the old XP OS on it. I'll get round that by running a command window as an administrator then! Oh no I won't! (hey it's nearly Panto season already :D ) Still no joy. Is there an easy way to get round the 'Nanny won't ley you' security in Vista? If not; what do you folks recommend as the simplest way to format the drive. It's only 40gb and doesnt need multi partitions as it's going to be used for backup purposes. I'm sure it was easier in DOS 3.3........ :) Trippy

Hi Kev The outlook.pst files will contain everything but beware of the archive.pst. That will only have anything that you have set up to auto archive or have individually archived in it. I'm going to run auto archive to archive EVERYTHING on each box's mail files to my external HDD and then just import what I want after the clean install. Knowing me, though, I probably won't then do what I should do and that is delete the thousands of old messages that I'm keeping "just in case" :rolleyes: Trippy

Hi Kev Yes, it's not much of a clean install as you say but not without some uses! I really want to start fresh with my systems (kids load so much rubbish) so will be formatting the drives per maynardvdm's advice. Out of interest how did you backup your mail files? (the ones that you found empty that is). I'm using a mix of OL 2003 and 2007 and was just going to save the .pst files to my external HDD and re load them after the OS install; but if that's not going to work I need a plan B :) Trippy