Hi all
This may not make a whole lot of sense so pls bear with me...
I am about to perform a routine check on one of my user's PC.
Some background - the PC has a Xeon processor and 4Gb of RAM and running XP SP3
He has 2xHDD and pagefile is hosted on the secondary HDD (D:) and min/max values are set to 4096. NO pagefile on C:
This user has 6 monitors so he has an NVIDIA Quadro NVS440 hosting 4xmonitors and an NVIDIA Quadro NVS290 hosting 2xmonitors.
There is a video card driver from NVIDIA which is compatible with both NVS440 and NVS290 and he is on the latest version of that driver.
(Note: Make of video cards are different - one is from leadtek and the other from Nvidia)
He is a heavy Bloomberg, Outlook, Word, and Excel user and runs two Citrix applications. Other apps are FoxIt PDF and IE.
Problems -
Outlook and Excel frequently crashes - I am going to perform an Outlook and Excel repair and also check/remove unnecessary addins - will he lose any customizations if I repaired and chose "Restore my shortcuts while repairing" and do not select "Discard my customized settings and restore default settings". Does repair really repair anything?
FYI - It stopped crashing ever since i moved a large spreadsheet he has open to his local HDD instead of over the network. This spreadsheet "refreshes" constantly as it is pulling live data to update cells and I suspect it was auto-saving so frequently that it caused crashes if saving over the network.
At times, his right click completely fails to respond. His left click works fine but he can't right click on anything in any Window and even on the desktop. Sometimes, he needs to start to close certain applications such as Adobe and the right click will start functioning again. I removed Adobe and installed FoxIt as I figured it was a resource issue but I do not think so as he does have sufficient resources when the problem is happening. Sometimes he can't bring task manager up until he kills certain apps. Definitely sounds like a resource issue but I am not confident that is the root cause.
Also not sure if this is related to one of the apps installed but his Start bar flickers (does not completely disappear) intermittently from time to time. The taskbar icons which are hidden appear and then get hidden again as if it was having "fits".
I have performed reg scans, malware scans etc but problems do not go away.
I am planning to perform sfc /scannow and office repair but would like to know if anyone has any other suggestions.
What about setting a "small" pagefile on C:. I have heard that this is recommended and may be the reason why a minidmp file was not generated when he encountered a blue screen.
Also, any feedback on his video cards? Do you think different models would cause problems? The drivers seem to work but he only has 2.5Gb out of 4Gb available RAM as I believe the video card chomped up a portion of this.
I have recommended creating a new profile for him but due to the amount of customisations he has and the amount of time and effort it will take to get him up and running again, he prefers to bear with the problem than to go down that path. However, at least once a week, his PC acts up and I can't think of any other tools or techniques to rectify his problems.
I guess we are at a stage where we just want to "stabilize" things so he won't encounter issues that frequently.
Any feedback is very much appreciated.
