Whole Lot of Nothing Going On With System Overload
Q: I have a new Dell PC with 256 megabytes of RAM, a 20-gigabyte hard drive and a 933-megahertz Pentium III. With either Windows Me or Windows 98, I frequently get the message “User resources dangerously low,” and the system will often freeze. I have only a handful of programs running at the same time, yet I’m forced to reboot and run the Norton Utilities Optimization program almost every day--sometimes several times a day. What gives?
A: The friendly geeks at Q&A; labs are going to zero in on the magic word “new” and suggest that the folks at Dell have configured your box so that it starts up with all sorts of unnecessary garbage. To see what’s running in the background, hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete once and study the programs you’ve got loaded up. We’re betting there’s a whole lotta nothing going on there. Try shutting down some of that stuff and see whether your situation improves. If so, keep it from starting up to make your life better.
With 256 MB of RAM, you really shouldn’t be having this sort of problem, assuming you’re not running huge Photoshop files and the like while ripping DVDs and running a Web site. But let us know if the problem doesn’t go away.
Q: I have a question related to DOS. I have a new HP computer running Windows 98 SE. On my old system, I had been running a spreadsheet from QPRO 4 DOS for my billing program. I loaded the program into my new computer, and everything went well for a while. But lately, when I try to print under Windows, the hard drive clunks like during shutdown before sending the info to the printer. The only way I can avoid this is to reboot to MS-DOS. Sometimes, I want to print only a couple of pages, and it sounds like the hard drive is being tortured. I don’t want to damage the hard drive, but the rebooting is a pain and transferring all of the client data to a new program could take weeks. Any suggestions?
A: You can’t damage the drive in normal operations, so don’t worry about that. But any time somebody says, “My drive sounds funny,” we err on the side of caution and advise that the drive be replaced. All drives fail eventually. We suspect that yours is sending you a message that it’s approaching the end of its operational life.
A wise man listens when his hard drive speaks. The only other thing we’d suggest is optimizing the data on the drive--defragmenting the drive, in geek speak--but before trying that, make sure the information on the existing drive is backed up, just is case the drive does indeed fail.
Q: An error message appears on the screen at start-up: “Mtx This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. If the problem persists, contact the program vendor.” When I hit details, I get the following message: “MTX_ caused an invalid page fault in module
A: We think you’ve been infected with the MTX virus, also known by several other variants. This is a particularly nasty bug because one of the things it does is block you from visiting anti-viral sites to download tools you’ll need to get rid of it. To test our hypothesis, try to visit sites such as https://www.symantec.com or https://www.mcafee.com and see whether your browser crashes. We’ll call crashes a positive result. The virus will even crash the browser if you type a word such as “symantec” into a search engine.
We know this because, in the course of researching your problem, we apparently managed to infect our own box with this jolly little specimen. Sigh. Sometimes we feel like a doctor battling yellow fever. Of course, we’ve got these air-conditioned and carpeted digs here at Q&A; labs, but you get the idea.
Try going to https://www.sarc.com/avcenter/venc/data/w95.mtx.fix.tool.html and following the instructions. This is going to be painful, but you can flush this bug from your system.
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Dave Wilson is The Times’ personal technology columnist. Submit questions to Tech Q&A; at techtimes@latimes.com.
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Connect: Check out past columns at www.latimes.com/techq&a;
