Here’s the info you need to ensure long, safe, trouble-free computing whether you’re starting the year with a brand-new PC, or with an older, used PC that’s new to you.

misc tech tools and tips from 24/7techs. your one stop tech shop.

Talk about bad luck! Reader Fred Peatross has started running into two of the very worst kinds of XP boot errors:

“One of my computers keeps getting the message ntldr missing corrupt file; hit any key. Recently, the message changed to a hal.dll file, either missing or corrupt.

“I can always do a cold boot and go right back into Windows XP. Warm boot doesn’t get me into Windows, I get the missing or corrupt file prompt. I thought my hard drive might be going bad, so I purchased SpinRite. Ran SpinRite, and the HD had no errors and was fine. Is this going to come down to a reformatting of my HD?”

Intermittent problems can be among the hardest to troubleshoot. But the simplest thing to do to try to resolve this is to start with XP’s Rebuild command. The short form of the fix is as follows:

Step 1. Boot from your XP Setup CD and enter the Recovery Console
Step 2. Enter the command attrib -h -r -s c:\boot.ini
Step 3. Delete the file (del c:\boot.ini)
Step 4. Run bootcfg /rebuild
Step 5. Run fixboot

Those five steps can fix a number of thorny startup issues and may be all you need. But if the above is too telegraphic for you, you can read fully detailed instructions in my InformationWeek article, “XP’s Little-Known Rebuild Command.” Microsoft’s official instructions can be found in “Description of the Windows XP Recovery Console” and “Recovery Console Tools and Settings.”

If the Rebuild command doesn’t help, you may be able to solve the problem by attacking each error message separately. For example, Kelly Theriot’s excellent site has a very complete how-to on the Missing HAL.DLL problem. Also, Microsoft offers “How to troubleshoot the ‘NTLDR Is Missing…’ error message” and ” ‘NTLDR is missing’ error message when you install or upgrade Windows XP.”

Finally, if none of these software fixes work, or if the problem comes back, then indeed you may have a subtle hard-drive problem. It may be related to a marginal power supply, a heat issue, or simple old age (i.e., the drive’s actuators are wearing out and functioning erratically).

There’s no simple diagnostic for that, but making sure the software is OK is the first step to whittling down the variables you face.

-WindowsSecrets.com

misc tech tools and tips from 24/7techs. your one stop tech shop.

More and more software requires Microsoft’s .NET Framework. As a result, reader questions like Bob Wilson’s are becoming more common:

“So far, I have avoided installing Microsoft’s .NET Framework, not seeing much use for more bloat and a bit concerned about adding another MS app to my system. It seems more and more things are requiring .NET.

“On Brian’s recommendation, I was starting to install Shavlik’s NetCheck Protect and again found I needed .NET installed. I’d appreciate your comments on the up and/or down side of installing .NET (and which version).”
When the .NET Framework first came out, Microsoft aimed it almost exclusively at developers. As I reported in the LangaList on Oct. 20, 2005, Microsoft even went so far as to describe its main benefits as “Realize New Business Opportunities, Reduce Time-to-Market, Write Less Code….” With practically zero benefit to end users at the time, there was really no reason to install it.

It took a while for things to change. For example, in an even earlier issue on July 3, 2003, I compared a classic drive-imaging tool to its .NET version. The older version fit nicely on one floppy, but the .NET version (plus the mandatory .NET Framework) required 85MB of files.

That was 60 times more code to do basically the same thing. It wasn’t 60 times better or 60 times faster or 60 times easier to use or 60 times less expensive. It was just 60 times fatter. That was nuts. The software publisher was using .NET just because it existed, not because it yielded any particular benefit.

But now, genuinely good .NET-based software has emerged. So the reasons for avoiding .NET have largely gone away. We’re now at a point where it’s becoming better to have it than not have it. (In fact, some core parts of Vista use .NET.) If you’ve been holding off, I’d say it’s time to go ahead and install the latest-available version, 2.0. It’s available on the Windows Update site.

-WindowsSecrets.com

misc tech tools and tips from 24/7techs. your one stop tech shop.

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misc tech tools and tips from 24/7techs. your one stop tech shop.