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General discussion

Monitor freezes

Mar 6, 2004 5:07AM PST

Hi, my brother has e-machine T2042 Windows XP, 40 hard drive, 128 memory ; He turns his computer on and as long as he is using it, it is OK. If he walks away for 15 minutes or so and comes back, the screen is black and is froze. He has to turn the computer off the wrong way. What could be wrong ? Thank you, Ruth

Discussion is locked

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Re:Monitor freezes
Mar 6, 2004 6:21AM PST

I see a few sources of problems with this situation.

#1: It's an E-Machines system. They manage to beat out even HP/Compaq for producing the biggest piles of crap that you can reasonably pawn off as a computer. As part of a former job where I was responsible for cleaning up people's machines, EVERYONE hated to see an Emachines system come in because one of us would have to work on it.

#2: Your brother is trying to run XP on 128MB of RAM. That's a great way to run the hard drive into the ground, you'll be doing so much disk paging due to lack of memory. Probably won't solve this problem, but an extra 128-512MB of RAM would do absolute wonders for the performance on that system. For instance, it wouldn't take about a half an hour to boot the thing or open an app.

#3: Power management features in computers can often times be unreliable. Turn off the power save modes for the monitor, and the problem will likely go away. Just remember for the sake of your power bill, that the monitor uses the most energy of any component of the computer, so turn it off manually if you're going to be gone for awhile.

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Re:Monitor freezes
Mar 6, 2004 7:43AM PST

Look into your power mgt. and verify the time for hiberate/sleep mode. Also, check the bios side of things and its "enabled" but use as simple as setting as possible if optionable. Under the power mgt. increase the time interval to say, 5min. and if it happens to freeze, play with the setting or disable those for the monitor. You may want to look into any XP updates or check the MS knowledge for direct tips/hints on the topic.

good luck -----Willy