Help please - seem to be frozen out of my computer

Marian Walsh

i am running Windows 8 on my computer. Since yesterday when I log in the start screen is frozen. There is a slider across the bottom of the screen. Yesterday I could get in by using the Windows key on the keyboard which reloaded the start screen. I could then get to the desktop but had no network connection. Today I can't get to the desktop at all. If I log in as my husband everything is normal.

Can anyone tell me what is going on?

Bayberry

if you hit CTRL-ALT-DEL can you bring up the Task Manager?

If so, click on More Details at the bottom if it's displayed, and find the process called Windows Explorer. Right-click on that process and select Restart

(You may need to click on the word "Name" at the top of the list of processes to sort that list by name. If it's sorted by CPU, the list will keep changing as different processes grap CPU cycles).

I found a few posts that suggest that doing this will resolve your problem. I'm not sure why such a fix would survive a reboot, though.

Aimead

If you don’t get the issue solved you can always create a new user account and use that instead (after copying over any files and the like of course).

If Bayberry’s suggestion doesn’t solve the issue can you let us know if the same things happens on a safe boot?

Marian Walsh

I restarted Windows Explorer as suggested but it has made no difference. I have set up a new user account but I have a lot of files to move and one program which I use a lot will now not run from either account.

Aimead

Can I ask what the program is and whether it can be reinstalled?

As a general rule I don’t use the default downloads and documents folders, but a separate folder directly on the C drive called Dox where absolutely everything goes into. That way my stuff is easily accessible across different users (and OS’s). But I do tend to muck up user accounts regularly enough that any to speed up switching helps.

Marian Walsh

Program is Silhouette Studio which is for a plotting cutter. It could be reinstalled but it would be complicated and I'd rather not. Been finding similar problems to mine on various forums dating back a couple of years but no answer yet.

Aimead

Time to start trying to narrow down the problem then. On another user account press “windows key + R”. This will bring up a little run menu – type in “msconfig” and hit enter. A box titled ‘system configuration’ should popup – go to the ‘services’ tab.

Disable every service that isn’t a Microsoft service or your Anti-Virus. You can always turn services back on later. Restart and see if the same issue is occurring with your other account.

Or, in other words, let’s turn **** off to see if we can find what’s causing the issue.

Marian Walsh

Have another problem now, I was downloading a windows update earlier and it's been saying " installing update 12 of 15 for hours

Irish Steve

If you can log into the machine, go in to the Control Panel. Administrative tools, event viewer, and have a look at the Windows logs, and then the system log within that category, then look for Errors. See if there are any disc read errors being reported, I had a similar situation last weekend with a family member's Win 8.1 machine, turned out to be some bad blocks on the disk that were part of the registry files.

Cleaned it all up by putting the disc into a caddy on another machine, and later that day, it was still pulling warnings of retries on the same general area of the disc, so it got swapped out and cloned to a new drive, and after some messing around to get it stable again during start up and update, it's OK again now. The disc hadn't failed completely, it was recovering the errors on a retry, but it was significantly slowing things down, as the error was in a core area of the operating system, so very heavily accessed by just about everything that goes on with the machine

Marian Walsh

I can't do anything now because the windows update is still stuck.

Irish Steve

OK, if it won't unstick, at some stage, you're going to have to power down (press and hold the power button until it powers off) and restart it, and see what happens. It may well take some considerable time to recover, but I have seen this before where a file is locked, and update won't finish, restarting the machine allows the update to complete, but in the process of recovering, it sometimes unwinds some updates before reinstalling them, hence the delay.

Other than that, if you can't get in to it, there's no other real option right now.

Marian Walsh

I powered it down and I'll leave it now for today. I think from what I've been reading on the web that setting up a new account is the only fix that there is. I'll get round to moving my files sometime. I have an iPad so can ignore the computer for a couple of days.

Marian Walsh

Just a quick update. I moved over all my files to my new account and everything seems to be working ok now. Very annoying that Microsoft
know about this problem and cannot help. I will seriously think about moving to Apple when I need to change my computer.

Bayberry

Marian Walsh wrote: »

I will seriously think about moving to Apple when I need to change my computer.

Because everyone one knows that Macs never have problems...

Aimead

Bayberry wrote: »

Because everyone one knows that Macs never have problems...

While this is true I have to admit that, with Windows 8, there do seem to a lot more niggly little problems than there are with Macs. An example that springs to mind is when a wireless card died and, due to having no internet, the person in question couldn’t logon to their computer (“The dreaded ‘Your PC is offline’ issue”). Not seeing as many niggly little issues with the Macs so far.