Philphollower

I contacted Compaq's (HP's) tech support and did a chat session with Darwin, one of their guys. He got me the HD utility specific to the OEM HD from Compaq, and everything checks out fine. Amazing what file error correction can do. I will back up the data again anyway, though -- our office computer has enough GB to swallow my laptop HD several times over ;-) Thanks, everyone. Cheers -- Phil

Thanks -- any suggestions re HD testing software? preferably shareware or freeware? ;-/

Thanks for the replies ... Yesterday the computer had several episodes of the trouble described above. I had to power it down withouth going through normal shutdown, and several times when I rebooted I got a message: "Operating system not found." Scary! though it did come back up after several attempts including unplugging and re-plugging the power and battery. I also contacted Compaq's online chat support, and Patrick walked me through a couple of basic things like emptying the minidump directory and deleting sysdata.xml files. I also ran the memory test from Microsoft's On-line Crash Analysis (http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp) -- which turned up no problems with the memory. I tried to run chkdsk (without /F) -- after several attempts with freezing and noise from the HD, it completed and identified file errors -- so I ran it again (with /F) and this appears to have settled things down. No new episodes or problems since. Given how unstable the system was before I ran chkdsk, I can't help but think that this must have done something close to the solution, anyway. But I'm still puzzled ... how would some file errors create so much chaos? Where would the file errors have come from? And should I still invest in another HD, just in case? My Windoze XP home appears to not have ScanDisk, can't find it at the command prompt, either. Is it built into Defrag now? Or is chkdsk the only such utility that comes with XP?

I'm running Windoze XP Home on a Compaq Presario 700 series laptop. I normally shut down at night, but during the day I'm on all the time, always connected to a home LAN and Internet, running Office 2000 and Firefox. I returned to my desk on Friday to see a dark blue screen with grey text beginning with something like "Kernel Stack Fault" error -- sorry I can't recall the exact term at the moment -- "Windoze is being shut down to prevent damage to your computer, ..." followed by instructions to restart if this hasn't happened before, and "Beginning physical memory dump ... " Unfortunately, it's happened a couple of times over the last 6 weeks. I also get a peculiar repeated clicking sound from the HD when this happens. I shut down the computer, unplugged the battery as well, and then reassembled it and started again. Now -- once before when this happened, it took several days before the unit would restart. No messages indicating that the HD had failed, despite the strange sounds -- though when I plugged in a couple of other HD's laying around the house, they worked. Is this impending HD failure, a RAM failure, motherboard problem, or software issue? Something specific that I should do about it, other than shooting it to put it out of its misery? ;-) Thanks, cheers -- Phil

As you will see from my posts, I'm having some problems with Office XP for Small Business. Microsoft has a free 60-day full-featured trial program of Office 2003 available on their site -- I'm wondering if I should just move over to 2003 and wait until I can dig up a solution to the XP problems, or move back to 2000 ... Is Office 2003 as stable as XP? Are there enough improvements to move to Office 2003, or should I just wait for the new 2005 edition to come out and hope I win the lottery to pay for it? Your thoughts are welcome ... Cheers -- Phil

This forum has been very helpful to me -- my thanks both to the folks who post questions and to those who use their time to reply to help. What I'm about to describe has been an issue since before the other topic I posted to this forum re the error message -- which is resolved in principle, thanks to your help. My Office XP for Small Business is running on Windoze XP Home, on a Compaq Presario laptop, with 256 MB RAM. I'm on a home ADSL network behind a hardware firewall, no ZoneAlarm software, no constant anti-virus software. (I do occasional scans, because the constant stuff slows the system down too much -- and viruses haven't been a problem anyway.) SpyBot S&D comes up with a clean system, no spyware or adware sending my HD to the net. When I have more than one document open in Word and I'm plugged into the network, I regularly get a freeze of up to 20 secs., especially when moving between documents. During the freeze I notice that the network icon in the sys-tray is glowing -- usually at least on the send side -- often on both sides. When I'm not plugged in, this doesn't occur. It happens regardless of whether or not I'm running either Outlook or Firefox (my web browser). Very annoying, and it sometimes interferes with various edit applications between documents. What's happening? Is there a setting in Word that I can change so that I can stay plugged in and avoid the delays? Or is this something in Windoze that I should be examining? Thanks again, enjoy your summer, wherever ye be. Cheers -- Phil

The computer was given to me in toto as a gift from a relative in Ontario, after she'd used it for a couple of years -- there's an image on the bottom of it for Windoze XP -- but I don't see a separate one for Office XP. I was told by a local dealer that with the image for Windoze they can (for a fee) clear the HD and re-install Windoze -- but that unless I had a separate sticker for Office, well, I'd have to buy the whole Office XP program. No Office XP CD's ever given by the dealer to the original owner. The serial numbers for both Windoze and Office have OEM in the middle of them ... But I have Compaq's Restore CD's -- which I'm told (by Compaq) have Windoze and their specific Compaq software on them -- but not Office. So ... I'm considering clearing the HD, restoring Windoze, and installing Office 2000, which I do have on CD. Just hate going backwards when perhaps with a few Registry tweaks I could get the XP program back ... I did take your advice on one matter: I ran Registry Mechanic and came up with a list of "deep registry errors" referring to fonts -- many! So though the freeware RM wouldn't repair it, I went in manually with RegEdit and cleared it up. This did help, and I'm not getting the original error 1907 anymore. That's the good news. The bad news is that now when I click on any Office application, e.g. Outlook or Word, I immediately get setup screens looking for the program CD's! I find that if I keep hitting "cancel" enough times, I can get the programs to run -- somewhat. I can open documents from within Word, but still no correction re the document icons: Word and RTF documents still show a WordPad icon, despite the Properties setting to "open with Word." If Word is already running, clicking on a WordPad icon will bring up the document in Word, but without the proper document name: "Document 2," etc. The document has to be saved-as to its proper name. If Word isn't running, clicking on a WordPad icon won't bring up anything. Does this kind of error put us into more familiar territory? Seems like something has shunted "opening" the programs into "install" mode. Thanks again for the replies.

Yes, but System Restore didn't want to create a restore point before the incident -- I had it running, but it wasn't running properly and won't restore to any point before the incident -- in fact, even though I've got the System feature configured to run Restore, at this point the SR program screen doesn't even come up. I could still try a manual registry restore, depending on how far back Windoze keeps it. If I made any other changes along the way, I imagine that these would be eliminated with a registry restore, right? Where would I find backup registry files, and how would I configure Windoze to call up the restored registry, instead of the corrupted one? Is it as simple as changing the prefix of the files from .bak to .exe or .dat? There are numerous "Ntuninstall ..." hidden subdirectoriesin my Windoze directory, many of which appear to have occurred over the past few months as I received Windoze updates, etc. Some seem to have occurred about the time of the incident that prompted this whole mess ... but I don't know how to activate them so as to restore the system. If they're System Restore directories, it's kinda weird that the program won't work to allow me to restore them ... Don't have the CD for Office -- it was pre-installed on the HD as a promotional feature by the dealer who sold the computer ... that's the heart of the problem, of course. If I can find one, I'm sorely tempted to clear the HD and start all over. But I guess borrowing one from a friend just to restore the broken pieces of my existing program would violate his EULA, right? Thanks for the reply.

This is Office XP Small Businesss, running on Windoze XP Home. I ran Norton's WinDoctor from the CD (not from an install, so no Repair History to reverse the problem), and it changed my XP settings so that all the Word document icons are now WordPad icons -- and whenever I start Word, whether directly from the Word icon or from a Word document icon, the program goes immediately to MS-Word Setup, and soon I get "error 1907: could not register font . Verify that you have sufficient permissions to install fonts, and that the system supports this font. Cancel, Retry, Ignore" Retry and Ignore loop back to the same dialogue box. Cancel goes to "Are you sure?" Yes goes to "Word 10.0: an error occurred and this feature is no longer functioning properly. Please run Setup and select "Repair..."to restore this application." However, OK starts Word anyway, though I have to name the documents every time I want to save and exit. Still show up as WordPad icons, too, though still calls up MS-Word instead. MS-Office on my machine is OEM installed on the HD as a promotional bonus feature by the dealer, so no CD's available. Detect and Repair wants CD's to do its job. Can't do a re-install without the CD's ... illegal (breaks EULA) to borrow someone else's CD's to do this, right? Trying to change the icon on the documents, and re-assigning the "Open with ..." to MS Word doesn't change the icon, though Word will go into its setup mode gyrations as described. The WordPad icon doesn't call up WordPad. Surely this is a simple registry error that can be corrected? Thanks!