My problem started when trying to save a project in windows movie maker (5.1) for the first time. I selected "save as" and WMM crashed. This happened again when I restarted WMM and tried to "save as." It also happened when I tried to "browse" for files to upload to YouTube in both Firefox 2.0 and IE6. I restarted my computer, and it happened again when I tried to attach an excel document to an email in Thunderbird. Each time the program froze and had to be closed by using ctrl+alt+del. The same activity on all 3 programs leads me to believe it's a problem with windows itself, probably the file explorer.
Please help!
Thanks
CodyZ
A little more information about your machine might be helpful.
"movie-making" is very resource intensive.
Therefore having built a movie and tried to save it, you may have consumed and locked up your RAM and CPU resources.
Later when you restarted your machine, your CPU and RAM should have been "freed-up".
So you should have been able to "browse" to upload to YouTube. (however, if you were uploading an mpeg/avi file, it could have been a "very large" file, again consuming a bunch of resources.)
Attaching an "Excel" file should have run more smoothly and without problems.
So your "suspicion" that you are having a Windows Operating System problem is a high-probablility guess, but it is "more likely" that you are running out of machine resources.
Diagnostic Questions:
What Operating System are you running? (example, XP, Server2003, Win2000, WinME, Win98SE)
What is your CPU rating? (example, 800mHz, 1.5gHz, 2.0gHz, etc)
How much Physical RAM is installed on your machine (example, 256mb, 512mb, 1.0gb, 2.0gb)
How much "free resources" does your machine show as being available? (example, 90%, 60%, 40%, etc)
How much "free space" do you have on your Hard Drive? - (example, Hopefully you have about 50%, but most machines will run OK with as little as 25%. When you get below 25% you'll start running into problems like you have described)
Here's a list of "most likely" difficulties:
-Hard Drive is very fragmented - Therefore reboot to SAFE Mode and run your Disk Defragmenter
-Hard Drive is too full - Run your Disk Cleanup utility to dump Junk files, and try to save large media files to CD in order to remove them from your Hard Drive and free up Hard Drive space.
-You have too many Background applications and processes running from StartUp menu (things like auto-updaters, Spam filters, AntiSpyware real-time scanning, possibly a resource hog like Norton/McAfee/AVAST!AntiVirus real-time scanning, – Therefore "disable" unnecessary StartUp File background running processes
-Malware running in the background - Therefore run your AntiVirus, AntiSpyware, and run a couple of Online Scans to remove Malware
-Device Drivers may have been corrupted - look in Device Manager for yellow or red warning alerts
-Operating System may have a missing or corrupted file - Run your System File Checker
Keep us posted with your progress.
Best Regards
Thank you for your detailed response!
I'm running XP SP2 on a Compaq presario 2232us laptop with a 1.4ghz celeron & 1gb of RAM, and I have about 10gigs free disk space on my 40gig drive.
I consider myself a seasoned computer user, and I think I take rather good care of my system. In fact, I rarely encounter problems. I use Ashampoo Winoptimizer and CC cleaner to optimize my registry, and keep my startup programs to a minimum (the only icons in my system tray are Power, Network Connections, Volume, and McAfee. My RAM usage is almost never over 50%.
I also defrag regularly (last time about a month ago), and as of this post it appears I'm due for another defrag with a total fragmentation of 12%.
McAfee does weekly scans, but I never seem to have any spyware problems, my system runs fast and I have no pop-ups, but I did a scan on adaware and I did have 1 low-risk tracking cookie.
There are no conflicts in the device manager.
I'll update later today after a defrag and a system file check
Thank you for your help!
more info:
The movie I was editing was a short 5 minute screen-capture that I took with the freeware Camstudio, I was eventually able to save it by not selecting a different folder to save it in, and just using the default "My Documents" folder that appears in the "save as" window. However, when trying to upload the video to YouTube, it froze everytime I navigated to the movie. So I went to email them to my girlfriends computer to upload them from there, and Thunderbird froze as well! Finally, I logged into gmail in firefox and was able to email the movie (only 2.8mb) to her computer and upload from there. I restarted my computer and didn't think about it again until the next day when I was trying to email an excel document, and again the attach file window froze thunderbird. I eventually got the file emailed by logging into gmail again.
The list of programs that have frozen when trying to access files:
Windows Movie Maker 5.1
Firefox 2.0
Internet Explorer 6
Thunderbird
While the previously mentioned steps should still be first priority, I wonder:
Have you previously been able to make screen-captures with freeware Camstudio, successfully?
