Hi Gerry,
Thanks for replying. I need all the help I can get here. I am not a
professional so I may ask you to clarify a couple things. Thanks for bearing
with me. Are you ready to solve a complicated mystery?
I'll address all your questions one by one:
1) As I mentioned, when I did Disk Clean, I only ticked the items that the
Windows description advised me was safe to do. At this point I do not
remember exactly which items they were and I am a bit reluctant to open Disk
Clean again for fear of compromising an already taxed C drive. Especially
since that is when all my problems began. Additionally my only backup, an
external HD, has further complicated my problems.
2) I too tend to think that something else is part of my problems. Perhaps
my Maxtor external hard drive is one of the culprits here. In essence I have
two individual problems.
I wanted to do a back up when I noticed something was wrong after the Disk
Clean issue. It took hours for the back up to complete. I let it work while I
went to sleep. When I awoke it said the back up had failed. Furthermore the
path to the F drive, which the back up was on, only showed one very old back
up. It looked like that particular old back up was the only one on the Maxtor
HD. But when I looked at the Properties for the Maxtor, the majority of this
large external was nearly consumed for the supposedly “failed†back up. This
amount of data was much larger than was originally on my C drive, it may have
copied portions of my C drive more than once. Yet I could not see what any of
these files were. I don't know how to solve this problem either. I think I
will remove the Maxtor program from my laptop and try re-installing it to see
if it can see last night's back up after that.
But even if that helps me see the external and all the files, that still
leaves me with the more urgent notebook problem. Somehow about 20 GIG of
files, etc were added to my C drive, leaving me with only 1.4 GIG of an 80
GIG HD. I don't know how to figure out what files those 20 GIG's are and then
how to remove them. I did a System Restore but naturally that did not remove
any of those extra 20 GIG's.
3) For my anti-virus and spyware I subscribe to McAfee Total Protect. I did
a scan of my now very large C drive last night and detected no problems.
4) I bought this HP Pavilion dv9000 notebook directly from HP on line, last
March. It was a refurbished model. I also purchased a 3 yr warranty with
them. I have looked through all the documents/items sent with the notebook
and the only CD I have is the XP Upgrade. Could it be that Windows was
already loaded on the computer and they just sent me the upgrade because I
requested XP Pro? I could call them to ask but I truly do not look forward to
dealing with that out-sourcing merry go round if I do not have to.
5) As far as all Error & Warning Reports go: Do you want ALL The errors (no
duplicates) I have received since this occurred? There are quite a few. I am
not exactly sure what you mean by no information. I copied one error message.
Is this what you are looking for? If so I will copy all of these in my next
post.
Event Type: Error
Event Source: W32Time
Event Category: None
Event ID: 17
Date: 3/11/2008
Time: 12:26:59 AM
User: N/A
Computer:
Description:
Time Provider NtpClient: An error occurred during DNS lookup of the manually
configured peer 'time.windows.com,0x1'. NtpClient will try the DNS lookup
again in 15 minutes. The error was: A socket operation was attempted to an
unreachable host. (0x80072751)
For more information, see Help and Support Center at
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Have I driven you mad enough yet? I appreciate your help more than I can say.
Ellen