Unsolved
This post is more than 5 years old
2 Posts
0
1160
July 14th, 2005 16:00
Improper Shutdown kills Desktop
Hi -
I'm actually posting on behalf of my 78-year-old Dad, who has never used a computer before and is (alas) quite clueless. He has a new Dimension 2400, and yesterday he (despite me telling him NEVER do this) was in a hurry and just shut down the computer using his power button. Very bad. Now, when he boots up, all he sees is his wallpaper - no icons, no taskbar, no Start button. He got put on eternal hold with tech support and gave up for the day. Is there anything relatively simple I can walk him thru over the phone to get him up and running again? (thought of the old CTRL-ALT-DELETE trick but decided not to try it) PLEASE someone help me help my poor daddy!
thanks from Texas,
Judy
0 events found
No Events found!
osprey4
6 Operator
•
34.2K Posts
0
July 14th, 2005 16:00
Judy:
While this is not really related to hardware or your hard drive, the first thing to try would be system restore. Follow the instructions here:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q306084
I should also mention that, if enabled, it should be fine to turn off the computer using the power switch. If you poweroff your computer without shutting down Windows (and letting your applications save their data and close, if necessary), you invite a whole lot of serious problems, as your father has discovered! The correct way to do this is: After a fresh reboot of the computer, in the Windows XP Control Panel click Power Options. Click the Advanced tab. In the Power Buttons section, under “When I press the power button on my computer,” select “Shutdown.” (If this is not visible on your Advanced tab, then your computer does not have the hardware capability to do this job correctly, or the capability is disabled in CMOS.) Click Apply. This sets your computer so that when you press the hardware power button it will first do a proper shutdown of Windows, and then poweroff the computer.