[TJD]

blame bill twatface gates

[AndyB]

I've got a PC World PC, and ive never really been happy.
The first one I bought I returned after it was shit slow on games and kinda hung on Winamp, its a P4 1.4 FFS! I rang their helpline and they said to Ctrl+Alt+Del and close every program(except Explorer) to run games, something that you really shouldn't if you want your PC to survive.
The next one I got is more stable and can cope, but it crashes frequently and my pop wants to take it in for a "Health-check." And yes, I've already told him they just run scandisk and defrag it..... Oh well.

I'm buying my own PC soon and am going to head for Evesham or Dell i think. Anyone got some other suggestions for computer companies that make custom PC's and have a good reputation. MESH and Viglen both seem a bit fify from what friends have told me.

[Spike]

You should try getting "Norton Utilities" or something similar there are loads of tools on there which would help stop anything like this from happening again, its worth getting as I always had problems like that and my computer is fine now. Also some of the tools can help speed your computer up a bit.

Hope that helps a bit.

[Morals]

You should be ok with Dell

[edmondo]

Or if you're clued up enough then you build your own! I've never had problems with any of the PCs that I've built for myself and others.

The problem with pre-built PCs is that they are generally built with one or two slightly below par components. Best example being when you get a Pentium 4 PC with a cheep TNT 2 graphics card. As a result games will not run very well, so all that CPU power is wasted.

[edmondo]

... Alternatively if you don't know how to build PCs then go for a company who do custom built PCs. Simply computers (http://www.simply.co.uk) seem pretty good for that sort of thing.

[Morals]

Building your own is definitely the way to go. I've got a spare P200 chip lying around if anyone wants it!

[edmondo]

Back to the original problem...

"Explorer has caused an error in <unknown>"

From my experience (I used to do a bit of techie work myself - but not for PC World!) messages like this at seemingly random times during the use of CPU intensive applications are just as likely (or more) to be caused by faulty hardware. Often a dodgy stick of ram can cause this.

I recommend getting hold of a program called AMI Diagnostics. You can probably find it somewhere. It will run a proper system test, more than any one at PC world would do. It will check your RAM and other components and I'd take a small bet at 5:1 that it's your RAM that's causing the problem.

[Funky Drummer]

ah, very interesting. thanks very much for that valuable piece of info edmondo. I'll try and find that piece of software you mentioned. It all makes perfect sense what you said about Ram intensive programs, as it's usualy only when I'm running things like AOL or cool edit that the explorer error occurs, and they're both very ram intensive.

Ta

Rich~

[Tall Pall]

It is synomynous with versions of windows prior to xp home and pro because xp dosnt support fatal returns on memory requests. Basicaly low memory or as edmondo said, faulty mem (its now down to the software not the os to determin what to do when this happens). So checking out the mem seems like a great idea. But no idea about the specifics behind the no sound, if uninstalling and reinstalling your entire sound hardware based software didnt work, then pfffft.... I would be kicking PC world staff's ass at this present moment in time (except its a sunday evening).

[Lawrie]

my pc can only really handle one MP3 file on my pc
it can only just about play champ manager 99/00

[Matt]

Haha... whenever someone has a tech problem, everyone on the board is suddenly a computer expert LOL

Get rid of AOL and get a real ISP...

Useful post that Matt...nice one...

[Funky Drummer]

yeah, but still sound advice matt. As far as I was concerned we should never have got aol. but my gaddam dad who thinks he knows everything about everything...

And believe me tall pall, if I could be kicking the preverbial ass of pc world at this moment in time, I would be.

Rich~

[Morals]

FD - I assume you removed the entry for the sound card from device manager and then either rebooted your machine or ran the add new hardware wizard. What happened? Did you get asked for the driver disk? Did everything seem to go smoothly?

[Funky Drummer]

I did just as you've mentioned there....but still no luck. Whenever I click on the Properties button it says that the device is working fine, but when I then try and play a piece of music, from either media player, cool edit, raduga, whatever, the message comes up that the device is not installed/not working correctly or the hardware is not responding.

I'm going to actualy open my PC to check that the sound card hasnt come loose or anything (don't think it has though).

When I try and run the "Upgrade Driver" thing, it says that the best driver for this pieve of hardware is already installed.

ARGH!

I'll keep you posted...

Rich~