"Not Responding" message

[pberruz]

Sometimes when I right-click a folder to either search or check its properties, etc, the system hangs up and when I do CTL+ALT+DELETE I see "not responding" next to the name of the folder.

Sometimes clicking the "End Task" tab will let me go back to the folder.

Sometimes the system hangs up and the only way to exit that is by restarting the PC using the on/off buttons on the box.

Why the problem is intermittant?
A virus? Corrupted driver?

[Captain Pooka]

Give me your computer specs, starting with age.

Processor, Hard drive (and how much space available) RAM.

What are you doing when this happens? Just... nothing, then you open a folder and BAM! Or... are you playing Entropia or Crisis and high everything?

For future reference, windows was stupid with that. When you open the task manager, the first tab is virtually useless most of the time for ending programs. Now Processes is the real prize. If you want to learn about computers, start toying with those. If you end something in Processes, it will end. You won't see folders in there, but you'll see iexplorer and stuff. If you end something that does something bad (like explorer.exe, go ahead and try it) it will be ok... just open up the task manager and go to File>New Task and type in what you ended (explorer.exe).

Or you can hold down the Windows Logo key and press R and run something there.

So that was sort of off topic, but not really. It will help you with these same kinds of problems.

On that note, is this only with folders, or is this with everything?


-Q

[pberruz]

I have a folder containing about 30 Word documents containing notes on research done in the past.

Instead of opening one document at a time to look for a word or phrase I go to the folder and do a right-click to start a search on that folder contents (30 documents).

Instead of getting the window showing a list of options or tasks (Open, explore, search, properties, etc) the system hangs up.

This only happens sometimes. Other times I have no problems.

[Captain Pooka]

Sounds like your computer sucks to me.

Specs please.

I have a list of things you can do as well, but after your specs. After you give me your specs, run Superantispyware (google it and run it, it's not a fake :P) and what are you using for virus protection? I use AVG free, just for a reference. I'll give you a list of things you can do to speed up your computer tomorrow.

It is unusual, though, that you have to restart your computer after a spell like this. Seems like it's just lag.

[~Darkseeker~]

ontop of that anti-spyware, run malwarebytes too. anything AVG or Avast! might miss, MBAM will pick up.

but yeah, specs now pl0x.

[Rickeh69]

Often, especially in IDE Hard Drives the computer tends to hang. This could be due a number of reasons.

1) Your hard drive has a higher transfer rate than which your connector can supply, in turn takes longer.

2) Spyware, malware, etc definitely not out the question.

3) The area you're trying to access might have bad or corrupted sectors, run "chkdsk" in Windows to see what's going on. Alternatively, you can use other programs to do this, too.