Screen Won't Refresh in Windows XP Professional

Go to the task manager CTL-ALT-DEL and find the process that is hogging up the CPU time and kill it.

Thank you for that guest, I've checked, but only the usual windows stuff is there, svhost, iexplore etc., but I will check next time it happens to see if anything else has started.

Tony

Is CR4 your 911 emergency phone call sir ?

Is this on your browser, if so check On the tool bar at the top, click on tools. Select Internet Options. On the general tab look for Browser History and click on settings. At the top of the pop up box choose check for newer version. This causes internet explorer to update the page whenever you visit a page.

Thanks Garth, it's happened on IrfanView and Adobe Reader 9 but I will check IE.

Tony

Irfanview is not that much & Adobe Reader may be. See how many are in your System Tray.

Normally it is due to overload of CPU & Mem.

Press Alt+Shift+Esc,

Check in Processes & Performance tabs. ou may get some hint.

I'd do the kill if you can catch it and that's causing the problem. Also I would suggest blowing the dust out and checking to see if the video card has a fan and if its running. A little dust really holds the heat in the boards.

I'd also recommend doing a registry clean up. A good program and free is called Glary Registry (repair) I think. You can find it on Majorgeeks.com. Defrag too.

What do you mean by "won't refresh"?

Do you have to shut down and power up again or just wait a few seconds for the screen to change?

If it's just a few seconds and you were reading for a while the harddisk probably went into power save mode and had to spin back up.

If it needs to be shut down then there is a good chance the HD is failing to come out of power save mode (ie the hard disk is ready to fail). No blue screen on this problem and normally you can still move the cursor around but not do much else.

Thank you Phantom

When I used a program which auto loaded, i.e. clicked on a jpg, then closed the program window, it's image stayed behind and the screen only refreshed in places. Also I have opened programs and centre of that program window shows the window underneath it. On the 4 occasions it happened, I rebooted and it fixed it.

This morning I checked, all 4 fans are working. I also blew out any dust, although it was fairly clean.

The HD is about 6 months old, although that means very little.

I will defrag as well and hopefully that will mark bad segments and give me a report to ponder.

I've included the Task Manager dumps, OUTLOOK.EXE is the biggest user.

Thanks for all the suggestions.

Tony

Unfortunately that behavior is typical of what I've experienced with HD issues.

It is very unlikely that any of the windows disk utilities will find/fix this kind of intermittent problem.

I'd download and run the HD manufactures drive test utility. These will almost always find issues if there are any.

PS: Make sure you have an up to date backup.

Tony,

Looking at your screen shot of the task manager, I see two things that bother me. Of course I can't see the whole thing but on yours Outlook shows 78,000+ of mem usage and IE Explorer shows 43,000+. That bothers me because my Outlook runs between 11 and 19,000+ and IE Explorer is coming in at 25,000 with a jump up to 33 at one point. Anyhow, the point is if your system is doing something that grabs big chunks of memory or cpu resources it will lock up as you've described.

I certainly don't have all the answers but I do have over 15 years experience in the computer business with a dozen employees. I strongly recommend running the registry program I mentioned in a previous post. There are lots of registry repair programs both paid and free the one I mentioned is free and does an excellent job and is easy to use.

Randy

Could really use more info. What kind of PC (Pentium III IV, dual core, I7, AMD)? What kind of video card or is it onboard? Have you tried updating the video card drivers, mom board drivers? Is it a dual output video card? DVI or analog? Are your monitors hooked up with some kind of video splitter from a single output?

Hooker