Vista Home Premium 64 bit

I ran the stuff in malware forums and timw told me to post over here. A friend's computer has issues and I'm trying to help her with it. It's running Vista Home Premium 64 Bit. No signs of Malware. No MS Office Apps will open, computer locks up for no reason and in task manager it shows she is always using 1.5 to 1.9 gig of RAM while running no apps. She only has 4 gig RAM and maybe that is normal for this OS but seems kind of high to me. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

 

Oops. One more thing. It also locks up when trying to update windows and it is on a critical update. Plus she said it started doing this when she installed a new wireless printer and updated windows. I uninstalled the printer already. Don't know if it could have been the printer or the updates she did that could have caused this, but I thought you should know about that part. Plus, I think I need to somehow get it to do the latest update but it keeps locking up.

 

Greetings, mikefrayser...

I'm sitting at an office machine with Vista Home Premium 64bit, 4 gig RAM, the only heavy-duty apps running are avast and Firefox: Task Manager shows 63 processes, 2% CPU, 43% Phys. Memory usage...the 1.5-1.9 is probably normal...

 

Maybe try Safe Mode for a while, see if you can duplicate the lockup?

 

I had to run some of the malware scans in safe mode but it doesn't lock up in safe mode. Should I uninstall office 2007 and reinstall? Is this thing using more RAM than it should when sitting idle?

 

The fact that it doesn't lock up in SF pretty much tells you it's a 3rd party problem, so, yes: try the Office uninstall/reinstall...you might wait to reinstall Office, though, to see if you can duplicate the lockups without Office onboard...

As far as the memory usage, I'd imagine that Vista uses a lot of idle resources: how many processes to you have running at idle?

 

There are about 41 processes running if I counted correctly.

 

That seems about normal - try the Office uninstall, see what happens...

I've got to vamoose - I'm sure some of the other MGs can help you - if not, I'll pick up on this thread asap...

Good luck!

 

Thank you very much. I can't tell you how much I respect what all of you do here.

 

There is no mention of Service Pack level. Is it SP1, or SP2?

Running win7 here: 66 processes (all users) and 19% memory (using 2.3GB out of 12GB)

 

I don't know the SP level and I don't have the machine here with me right now. I will check and get back though. Again, thank you so much for all that you guys do here. Do you take donations to your cause?

 

Nope, slave labor doesn't pay.

Besides we help on our OWN time. No one here is hired to help here.

 

Mike, you should be able to see your SP level by opening the Control Panel, System - the Windows Service Pack # should be displayed on that page...

 

Vista Home Premium SP1. The installation of the following update fails and it says it fails for an unknown reason - Security Update for Windows Vista for x64-based Systems (KB969947). I uninstalled MS Office because the computer was still locking up on occasion. What can I do to help you guys help me figure out what is causing this? Thank you.

 

I ran System File Checker in Vista it said it found corrupt files but could not repair all of them. It created a log but it won't let me open it. Can someone please help me?

 

Have you tried manually installing vista sp2?

 

I looked at the update installation history and it says that she tried to install it twice and it failed and then she evidently cancelled it when it was installng again. How do I install SP2 manually?

 

Could someone please tell me how to manually install vista sp2?

 

I ran the readiness tool or whatever it was and it said installation was completed successfully and then I tried SP2 from the link below and it was not successful. I pasted the screen shot of the failure message into a word doc and it is attached. Please help. Well, let me rephrase that. I WAS going to upload the screen shot but this thing says the file is too big. Please help. The computer is working better after uninstalling a bunch of other updates but Internet Explorer just shuts down for no reason and it does it often.

 

Can someone please help me. I ran the readiness tool and it runs fine and then try to install stand alone SP2 and if fails every time. Is this a common Vista problem? Someone told me that upgrading to Windows 7 would resolve these issues. Will that resolve this? Machine just locks up when IE is running. Running IE8 too. Could that be a problem?

 

This worked for someone else so worth a try:

I don't know why. I had to go through all the things to try one more time, step by step, still the SP2 won't install.

Then I decided to take the machine to the office and use our higher speed and much higher download
quota. It worked (installed), smoothly!


All is well now.