OT: Computer Troubles

[CraigSca]

My wife's PC seemed to be "acting up" a little yesterday - running some things slower than normal. Today, she woke up and noticed things were taking FOREVER to do, so she decided to reboot. Now, it's taking about 20-30 minutes for the thing to even reboot. The mouse moves around at normal speed, but when you click on the "start" button, it takes 1-2 minutes for the PC the respond.

She's running XP Home edition, and we have Norton Antivirus running every night. I'm going to re-run a full check when I can finally get the thing to respond. The PC itself has been running fine for 2 years now, 1.8 GHz, 512 MB RAM, etc. Nothing like this has ever occurred.

Is this definitely a virus? Anything else I should be looking for? Everything, and I mean everything now takes FOREVER to do on this PC :(.

Thanks in advance for any advice...

-Craig

[3ric]

Defragmentation of the hard drive is one of the first things you do, at least if the analysis shows that the files are badly fragmented. That increases over time, so if it's been running for two years without defragging, then the CPU has to look all over the place where the little pieces of the files are stored.

[CraigSca]

I defrag the PC occasionally, so I don't think that's the problem.

It's still rebooting, and Norton Antivirus just told me that it can't verify it's settings which could be a sign that a virus is trying to disable the software. Sigh. It suggests that I uninstall and reinstall Norton AV. That's good, I should have that done by 2007.

You know, I hate to get melodramatic, but unemployment paired with garbage like this is not what I need right now. A big "high-five" to the jackasses who wrote this thing - you've succeeded in making me more miserable.

'Grats.

-Craig

[MikeVic]

Try starting in safe mode... if everything runs fine in there, restore your computer to an earlier state... it's soemwhere in the Properties of My Computer. If your computer still runs slow when in safe mode, I don't know what to do. :(

[CraigSca]

How do you start up in safe mode again? Hit F8 while booting?

[MikeVic]

It's either F5 or F8... I just keep on hitting both of those, and it gets into safe mode. :)

[JAG]

I'm no expert, but you might try running Scandisk or whatever's in WinXP while in Safe mode too.

[Desnudo]

I defrag the PC occasionally, so I don't think that's the problem.

It's still rebooting, and Norton Antivirus just told me that it can't verify it's settings which could be a sign that a virus is trying to disable the software. Sigh. It suggests that I uninstall and reinstall Norton AV. That's good, I should have that done by 2007.

You know, I hate to get melodramatic, but unemployment paired with garbage like this is not what I need right now. A big "high-five" to the jackasses who wrote this thing - you've succeeded in making me more miserable.

'Grats.

-Craig

You've been lucky that you've been running XP for two years and have never had this problem before. Go to support.microsoft.com and do a search. It's possible that your registry settings got corrupted, virus or through regular use. If you can't resolve the problem using their instructions then insert the Windows CD and boot to it. Then use the repair current installation option. This may or may not work. If it does not, then move any necessary files to another computer or email them to yourself. Then reformat your hard drive and do a fresh reinstall of Windows.

Once that new installation of Windows is installed do one thing immediately: download a free copy of a firewall program. I suggest Zone Alarm (www.zonelabs.com). It works great, is easy to use and understand, and uses very few system resources. This way you can be sure in the future that it is not something external that is causing your problems.

[CraigSca]

Thanks for the advice, I'll do everything everyone's suggested - as soon as I can get the PC to respond to something :(

BTW - ZoneAlarm is installed :)

[wishbone]

I had a similar issue with a Win2000 PC at work. We did all the maintenance stuff and then tried to reinstall windows, that's when it reported an "imminent hard drive failure detected" Replaced the hard drive and re-imaged it, no further issues.

[CraigSca]

PC comes up "normally" in safe mode - running a Virus Scan now...we shall see.

[CraigSca]

Virus Scan shows nothing...I'm not trying to defrag the disk and it's taking FOREVER - permanently at 1% complete, it seems.

For the life of me, I can't find scandisk in XP - does it exist?