computer question

[27groo27]

question about a win ME machine, about 3 yrs old; hard drive 21 gig with only 400 mb free;-running very slow-
removed lots spyware ;
now a worse problem:
when restart, it hangs at the win me screen, and if you hit escape, it says something to the effect of- windows is updating system configuration files, this may take several minutes, please wait-;but it doesn't advance from that point even after 10-15 minutes and just hangs;
one time after computer was off for 3 hours or so it did after a few mnutes get through this sequence and loaded normally to windows;but again after a restart it repeated the sequence and hangs at win me welcome screen, hit escape and see same message asking you to wait for updating system configuration files -but just hangs up and wont proceed past this point;tried to load to safe mode and same problem.

appreciate any thoughts

Thanks

[earther]

Have you posted over at the MS Community board?
http://support.microsoft.com/newsgro...-US;newsgwinme

[Bluebarry]

question about a win ME machine, about 3 yrs old; hard drive 21 gig with only 400 mb free;-running very slow-
removed lots spyware ;
now a worse problem:
when restart, it hangs at the win me screen, and if you hit escape, it says something to the effect of- windows is updating system configuration files, this may take several minutes, please wait-;but it doesn't advance from that point even after 10-15 minutes and just hangs;
one time after computer was off for 3 hours or so it did after a few mnutes get through this sequence and loaded normally to windows;but again after a restart it repeated the sequence and hangs at win me welcome screen, hit escape and see same message asking you to wait for updating system configuration files -but just hangs up and wont proceed past this point;tried to load to safe mode and same problem.

appreciate any thoughts

Thanks

Wow, that system sounds like it's in bad shape. I don't think you specified how much memory you have on the system, but it sounds like you need to do something about the hard drive space. If I'm understanding you correctly, you have a 20gb hard drive with only 400mb left? At that point your going to run into some problems, the hard drive is loaded way past its capacity. You need to allow the hard drive and the operating system enough space to preform it's operations. When windows starts it loads a ton of things from the hard disk and you may just be running out of space on the hard drive to load all of that data into memory. It requires disk space to load files as well.

I think your best bet at this point is to format that hard drive and start over. I'm sure it's loaded with tons of GB of data that's not needed.

Also how long has it been since you've ran a defrag on that hard drive? It might be a good idea to try that as well to help on the speed end. I would be reluctant to run dfrag on a system that low on disk space though, as you might not have enough space to preform the defrag correctly.