Tech Tip Daily

I got a call from my Mother the other day, stating that her computer was having problems.  When she opened ‘My computer’, it would often take 30 seconds to a minute to load up and display all of her network drives.  During this time, the window was blank and the entire computer would hang.  While you could move the mouse, nothing would respond until after ‘My Computer’ finished loading.  While I had seen this before on other machines, it was never a big enough issue for me to warrant fixing it.

Like all problems, I started by searching google.  I quickly came up with a few solutions, none of which seemed to help the problem.  In an attempt to self-diagnose, I tried the process again, opening ‘My Computer’, while immediately opening ‘Task Manager’ to monitor network and CPU performance.  Surprisingly, neither was working exceptionally hard.  I had figured all along that this issue had something to do with the 7 network drives she had mapped, but I wasn’t sure quite what.  She said that her coworkers had the same drives but had no problems.  In addition, she was experiencing the same problem on all of her machines.

Given these circumstances, it seemed that the culprit lay somewhere within her user profile for the network or in her scheme for mapping drives.  Before having her System Admin rebuild her user profile, I decided to try a few more things.  I began opening the network drives to check the contents, and found that 3 of the drives were not available (receiving errors when attempting to open them).  On a hunch, I disconnected those 3 drives and restarted.  After logging back in, opening ‘My Computer’ displayed the drives almost instantly, and additional attempts yielded the same results.  So Apparently, having a “dead” drive mapping can cause ‘My Computer’ to be slow to respond.  At any rate, if you’re having the same problem, here are a few things to try.  Keep in mind that this symptom usually occurs on a workplace computer, and it may be against your organization’s policy to make changes to the system.  Check with your System Administrator prior to performing any of the below steps.  And if it’s your personal machine, then by all means, go nuts.

Note: I should mention, I have no idea what the two services mentioned below actually do; I’ve not ever taken the time to figure it out.  As it’s usually my personal policy to try anything, and then fix any problems as they arise, I don’t recommend this for everyone.  Disable these services at your own risk.

To speed up ‘My Computer’:

1. Verify the connection to each of your mapped network drives.  If you receive an unwarranted error connecting to the drive, right click and select ‘disconnect’.  Repeat this for each erroneous drive.
2. Disable the “Windows Image Acquisition (WIA)” service (Start->Run, type “Services.msc” and hit enter.  Scroll down to the aforementioned service and right-click -> disable)
3. Disable the “WebClient” service.  Follow the directions from step 2

Hopefully, this fixes your problem.  If not, comment.

That’s all!  Thanks, and happy computing!

Of all of my most frustrating problems, this one is in the top 5.  On numerous occasions, I’ve started my computer for the day only to show “local only” for my connectivity.  I would try the usual troubleshooting steps, such as refreshing my IP address, ending up empty handed.  Upon closer inspection, I would find my default gateway to have two entries; the first of these was ‘0.0.0.0′, and the second being my true default gateway (my router).  The quick solution to this was to open a command prompt window (Start Menu -> type ‘CMD’ and hit enter in the ‘Start Search’ window.  Typing ‘route delete 0.0.0.0′ would remove the faulty gateway.  Despite the quick solution, it never fully resolved the problem.

One day, I had enough.  I spent some time researching to find out exactly what the problem was.  Come to find out, it’s an error in Vista with the IPv6 protocol.  The solution is to disable IPv6 functionality in Vista, which in most circumstances isn’t too much of a problem as IPv6 isn’t widespread (of course, solving a problem by disabling functionality never seems like a valid solution to me).

To disable IPv6 in Vista:

1. Open Network Connections from the Control Panel
2. Right-click on your active, Local Area Connection and select ‘Properties’
3. Un-check “Internet Protocol Version 6 (TCP/IPv6)”, “Link-Layer Topology Discovery Mapper I/O Driver”, and “Link-Layer Topology Discovery Responder” in the list.  Click OK
4. Restart the computer

Hopefully that fixes your problem.

That’s all!  Thanks, and happy computing!