Hard drive problems

jank

Right my hard drive seems to be dying on me
Im after running ad-aware and norton to scan for viruses, found 3 and deleted them! (my subscription ran out last month so i may have a virus without me knowing it!)
But no raise in performance
(takes an age to load!)

Can i get another virus checker for free somewhere and has free updates!

any ideas on how to speed things up rather than the obvious (delete files and programs to free up ram)

sceptre

Deleting files and programs won't free any RAM unless it's a program actually running and taking up RAM.

Defrag your hard drive lately?

jank

yea but when i go to do it XP tells me "dont bother" !

Go figure!

Dr. Dre

You can get a free AV utility here

ando

google for a program called 'Advanced Startup Manager'. Its an excellent little tool with a great simple interface to limit what programs startup on your computer (take up Ram + Cpu).

sceptre

Originally posted by jank
yea but when i go to do it XP tells me "dont bother" !

Go figure!

You think your computer is smarter than you?
(or worse, me:D)

AFAIK the built-in defragger for XP won't do nice things like defrag the MFT or even directory-defragging. Any of the commercially available ones (I like Diskeeper) will.

And obviously do what ando and Dre said.

The Muppet

Housecall from trend micro is a good online scanner. Has the loss of performance been gradual or a sudden developement? How much free diskspace have you on your c : drive?

jank

Kinda of a sudden decrease of speed
Is there a "free" version of that diskepper

I have almost 25% of my Hard Drive free at the mo

jank

Ok deleted more of my stuff and used advanced system startup but still the same
It lags like hell when its booting up too

This may be connected to the fact that my norton subcription expired a few weeks ago and a virus or something may have sliped through...


so how do you install an *.iso!?


i heard you can burn it to a cd or use a virtual drive to install it from that so anybody recommend one of these methods and tools to go with it!?

if it aint a virus/trojen then it must be a memory leak or something weird like that

cheers for the help everyone

sceptre

Originally posted by jank
so how do you install an *.iso!?

i heard you can burn it to a cd or use a virtual drive to install it from that so anybody recommend one of these methods and tools to go with it!?

You heard correctly. Two options, each with an advantage and disadvantage. Burn it to a disc and it's not taking up space on your hard drive but you'll actually need the disc. Use a virtual drive with it and it's taking up space on your hard drive but you don't need to find the disc (you mount the big image file as a virtual drive).

I'd recommend either Nero or Alcohol120 to do either. Both come with a virtual drive program, though the Alcohol one is probably easier to set up. If you're burning the disc, in Nero you'll use the "Burn Image To Disc" option, in Alcohol it's the "Image Burning Wizard"

sceptre

Originally posted by jank
Kinda of a sudden decrease of speed
Is there a "free" version of that diskepper

If there's an implication in the "free", than yes, I'm sure it's the kind of thing your above average software pirate keeps updated and probably shares out as well.

If there isn't, no, but you can get a 30-day fully-functional trial from here (it's the first item on the page). Worth a try.

Macker

Dump Norton it's a piece of crap ,get AVG as posted above ,and the latest updates ,free as long as it's on a single computer ,then get adaware and spybot search and destroy ,


Macker

scion

Norton Utitities 2004 Alternatives...

Antivirus: AVG Pro
Speed Disk: Diskeeper
Utilities: System Mechanic

milltown

Unless I'm very much mistaken Norton will still update virus definitions after a subscription has expired, so it will find them and alert you to their presence. Afaik what it won't update is the rules telling it how to deal with them. Run Liveupdate anyway and when you get a box prompting you to renew your subscription either close it or skip past it (can't remember which) and it will go ahead and grab the available updates.

Definitely run Spybot S+D and/or Adaware. Spyware and adware is notorious for slowing down a system.

jank

done that but still the same old story what else could be wrong with it!?

jank

Ok may have figured out whats wrong here

I detect 2 cmd.exe proccess that take up all of the the cpu's resources and the only thing i have open is Internet Explorer.

I gather they are some kind of command shells?! so what the feck is causing it!

also have a crss.exe running to talking up some resources but im more worried about the later!

moridin

It sounds to me like you've still got virus issues.

Run ad-aware / spybot and an anti-virus program in windows safe mode and see what it comes up with.