Advice from XP users, please

[Daiquiri Van-Derveld]

Any ideas or suggestions need to be typed out in itty bitty simple layman's terms.

My Dell pc is just over a year old. Ive never dl'd any of the Winodws updates that I regularly get but Im wondering if I need to.

My girls use Kaaza on a weekly basis.....they do use it for research and writing papers for school.....I dont game or watch movies......its pretty much SWF/Meras and the IM's we all use. If this tells you anything, I still 82% of free space on the pc :)

This also leads into a prob I might have. My disk cleanup and defrag arent wanting to run properly. Cleanup will start out compressing old files but stall at 1%, though the little green on the pc is flickering like mad. Defrag will anaylize but stall out (again) at 1%.

Also, when I try to run these two programs, my pc runs louder than when Im on the boards, etc.

Would there be updates to these? Do I need to reinstall something?

HELP

[imported_Marcus]

You really should have Service Pack 1 installed and then all the patches after that. I'd also be wary of Kazaa and use Kazaa lite instead.

I'd say you may have an anti virus program interupting the defrag. Do you have one loaded?

[Dasquian Belargic]

I'd say you may have an anti virus program interupting the defrag. Do you have one loaded?

I'll field that - yes. Norton Anti-Virus 2002.

[Daiquiri Van-Derveld]

The anti-virus and defrag dont run at the same time, if thats what youre meaning.....?

This morning I received a new Norton av and implemented it and also dl'd Lavalight AdAware.

I dont know adding those had any effect or not but Im running slower today :\

[Charley]

Install linux, problem solved :cool

[Figrin D'an]

Originally posted by Daiquiri Van-Derveld
The anti-virus and defrag dont run at the same time, if thats what youre meaning.....?

This morning I received a new Norton av and implemented it and also dl'd Lavalight AdAware.

I dont know adding those had any effect or not but Im running slower today :\


Even if it appears that an anti-virus program, like Norton, isn't running while your doing other tasks, it likely is running in the background without you noticing it. By default, both Norton and McAffee install with the anti-virus programs set to run constantly in the background, and thus take up CPU cycles. You'll have to manually disable it, reboot, then you should be able to defrag.


Depending upon how fragmented your hard drive is, things will run a LOT slower than they should. In terms of the extra noise, I wouldn't be too concerned about it. Defrag can require a lot of processor power, which can translate into the processor fan speeding up to compansate for increased heat. The hard drive will whine and click alot to, because your moving a lot of information on it to different locations.


Listen to Marcus... don't use Kazaa. Use Kazaa Lite, or get something completely different.


Once you get these things straightened out, GO TO WINDOWS UPDATE AND DOWNLOAD ANY CRITICAL UPDATES. I can't stress that point enough. People not keeping up with Windows Update is the main reason why there have been problems with recent worms. Without the system patches, your PC will be vulnerable to any number of security holes.


You may also want to consider running a firewall program, but we can talk about that once you've taken care of these other things.

[Daiquiri Van-Derveld]

Unless the update states that its a critical one, I would be lost. It all looks like it was written in Greek, to me. Does anyone know the specific name(s) of a critical update?

I do have a firewall and its a good one - just ask Charley ;)

I do need to uninstall Kazaa and will get on that soon.

[Pierce Tondry]

If you use the Automatic Update feature of windows XP, it will distinguish between critical updates and those that are not critical.

[Mu Satach]

or you can go to
http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com

Click Scan for Updates

It will then say "Looking for updates" something something blah blah...

Then on the left will be:

Critical Updates & Service Packs
Windows XP
Driver Updates

It should walk you through the install process fairly easily.
Review, select and install.

then lather, rinse & repeat...
(ie. install, reboot and scan for updates again)

If you've never installed any updates there are a few that need to be installed by themselves and a few that need the computer rebooted before you can install more updates.

Install everything under the Critical Updates & Service Packs.
You can pick and choose the others depending on your system and what makes sense to you...

[patrick139]

Daiq, Since i know you don't know alot about pc's ( no im not making fun of you lol) chances are you do have alot of spy/adware on your system and probably haven't maintained and tweaked the systems capabilites over the course of the year you got it. The End result is a slow PC that is giving you problems...Especially since you didnt keep up to date with windows updates..

Bottom line here folks. EVEN if she gets all of the windows updates, runs a Full virus scan, Gets to Defrag, and Takes care of any ad aware, Her system will STILL have issues. The HD has taken to much of a toll over the course of the year because of not being properly maintained as i stated above.
What you need to do is Format the HD ( if you dont know how, try and find a friend you know in RL that can do it for you) and re install The OS ( Be sure to back up anything you wanted saved onto another drive or on CD).
A Nice Clean Fresh Install , then from that point on always keeping your PC up to date with windows updates, and patches, firewall/anti virus updates will do your system well.

There are probably alot of small things on your Hard Drive that wont be able to clean off other wise.

[Figrin D'an]

Originally posted by patrick139
Bottom line here folks. EVEN if she gets all of the windows updates, runs a Full virus scan, Gets to Defrag, and Takes care of any ad aware, Her system will STILL have issues. The HD has taken to much of a toll over the course of the year because of not being properly maintained as i stated above.
What you need to do is Format the HD ( if you dont know how, try and find a friend you know in RL that can do it for you) and re install The OS ( Be sure to back up anything you wanted saved onto another drive or on CD).
A Nice Clean Fresh Install , then from that point on always keeping your PC up to date with windows updates, and patches, firewall/anti virus updates will do your system well.


Yes, that's true, but the key words here are "find a friend you know in RL that can do it for you." Unless she can find such a person, doing a full HD wipe, partitioning, and reinstall is not something that a novice should tackle by themselves, even with XP, which is infinitely easier to install than some other incarnations of Windows. It's going to be nearly impossible for one of us to completely document the entire process for her to follow, either.

Just try some of the previous suggestions, Daiq, then let us know if your system performance improves.

[Morgan Evanar]

Also, how much hard drive space do you have left?

[Sejah Haversh]

Have you run Spybot yet?

[imported_Marcus]

Bottom line here folks. EVEN if she gets all of the windows updates, runs a Full virus scan, Gets to Defrag, and Takes care of any ad aware, Her system will STILL have issues. The HD has taken to much of a toll over the course of the year because of not being properly maintained as i stated above.

What you need to do is Format the HD ( if you dont know how, try and find a friend you know in RL that can do it for you) and re install The OS ( Be sure to back up anything you wanted saved onto another drive or on CD).

.........



Rot. Even after spy and adware abuse, for the machine Daiq has stated she has, it is still savable and repairable for someone who knows what they are doing. It is a lightly used machine, thence it can be repaired well. I can and have repaired worse quickly and easily and frankly, reinstall is the absolute last thing I would do. The only time you have a forced reinstall should be for hardware replacements or the OS is so screwed up it's unworkable.

I only reinstall when I have done some hacking and so completely root my machine, it's almost unworkabel.

Morg, she said she had 82% of disk left.

Daiq, the other thing I would watch is what you have being loaded at start up. You can check by going to All Programs > Startup. You should have very little, if anything at all. "Find Fast" and "Office Startup" are two surprisiongly bad performance killers, esp Find Fast. It should be renamed "PC Slow"

[patrick139]

A repair is only a temp fix You should know that. Daiq knows my knowledge of PC's is high. She trusts my advice.

[Morgan Evanar]

A repair is only a temp fix You should know that. Daiq knows my knowledge of PC's is high. She trusts my advice. Uhh-huh.

Look, XP cleans up pretty well, just like 2k does. My sister's 2k installation has lasted about a year and a half, and its almost as snappy as the day it was installed.

Look, not to get into a E-Dick contest, but what kind of qualifications do you have here?

[imported_Firebird1]

There is no need for a Format with this problem, just disable the Auto-protect for Nortons, reboot and enjoy.

And by the way...


A repair is only a temp fix You should know that. Daiq knows my knowledge of PC's is high. She trusts my advice.

Wrong, a repair is something that can fix the problem permently. Most problems on a PC are small things that do not need anything major (like reformat), and deal with the Operating System directly. The defrag problem is one of them.

[imported_Marcus]

A repair is only a temp fix You should know that

Forget that reply I posted, it'll clutter daiq's thread and not help her.

[Mu Satach]

lather, rinse & repeat...

then if the system still needs a hot oil, color treatment & a perm find a local well trained stylist hon...
else risk the horrors of a really bad fried system...

:)

[Daiquiri Van-Derveld]

My pc only started running slow the past 24 - 36 hours. Norton was never a prob before as my pc has never run slow since Ive had it. This is a first time deal.

Yes, I ran the AdAware program and it located 206 spyware-thingies....and took care of all but 6 of them.

I'll check out the updates now for Windows and go from there.

Thanks guys (and Mu ;))....I'll keep you posted :)

EDIT:

I found 2 critical updates and one update that said Microsoft highly recommended it (media player), even if you had uninstalled it the first time.

All 3 are dl'ing now and I'll go from there :)

[TheHolo.Net]

Spybot - Search and Destroy > AdAware

And I'll support Morgan and DT in saying that a format is not needed to fix an XP PC in this case.

My professional qualifications:

CompTIA A+ Certified
CompTIA Network+ Certified
CompTIA Security+ Certified
I also have 3 years of experiance as a help desk technician supporting NT, 98, XP and 2000 for a worldwide company.

I am also, at this very time, studying to take my Windows XP - Microsoft Certified Professional test as well as a couple of others for Windows 2K Server and MS Active Directory.

So, once again, I will say what others have already said one more time to drive this all home.

Go to the Windows Update site, download and install all of the critical updates (it will select those updates for you automatically after you "scan for updates" - you will not need to wade through them and pick and choose). After the PC reboots from your first update session, go back there and scan again to see if there are any others in the critical update area. Repeat the scan/install/reboot proceedure until there are not any critical updates to download at the Windows Update site.

Download, update and run Spybot - Search and Destroy. After it is run let it fix all of the problems it finds. It sounds to me, by your description of your issues, that you may have a trojan horse or zombie program running on your PC that was put there through malicious and anonymous means over the web. Spybot finds those and kills them quite well.

Get a firewall software application like Zone Alarm, install and use it. It will help a great deal to prevent trojans and zombie programs from being installed on your PC covertly in the future. I believe you can get a free version of Zone Alarm on the web.

After all of these steps are done, run defrag. :)

Best of luck.

[Daiquiri Van-Derveld]

Best of luck.

You know me well :D

I have a good firewall (I think) and I did dl the Lavawhatsit that Jenny told me about. You think I still need the Spybot thing, Net-Man?

[TheHolo.Net]

It is a good idea to.

Spy-bot is much better than adaware in my experience. I did a side by side comparison on and old PC that did not have a firewall and after adaware had been run Spybot still managed to find many more problems and was also able to fix the ones that adaware could not.

[imported_Marcus]

I've finally admitted defeat and doing MSCE. You would think that with a resume as extensive as mine, with 13+ years of experience of neworks with mainframes, UNIX, Windows servers of all types, Linux, secuirty, Cisco hardware software and support for big and small companies that all that would override a piece of paper that frankly teaches you the wrong way to maintain W2K servers and all it really does indoctrinate you into MS thinking and point n click adminning without truly understanding the base concepts.

Gah. No it dont. Agencys been telling me they could walk me into just about any job if I had it. But it's difficult without it.

Least they are talking to people now... least the market's picking up.

after MSCE, I'm returning to do the Cisco courses - which IMO are actually worth something. Those I going to enjoy , I've always loved playing with the big Cisco stuff.

[Mu Satach]

Listen to Net man, you must! ;)

I'm going to have to check out spybot tomorrow. I've had some minor funkyness on one of my user machines that I thought was something spywareish, but ad-aware turned up nada.

On a side note I'm so irritated that Oracle tried to take over PeopleSoft. My users are tied to IE because we use peoplesoft. Psoft was going to branch out and support other browsers in the future but all of that has been basicly nix'd because of the take over. :\

I wish I could delete that thing from our computers.

[Daiquiri Van-Derveld]

Right now, with the 3 dl's alone, its running faster :D

I'll go back and look for more criticals....do I need ALL patches? Then I'll get the Spybot :)

[imported_Marcus]

No, only criticals is all you need. The others arent really needed. The Media Player 9 update is to be avoided.

\I've finally managed to convince some of my clients to switch to Mozilla. Workign on the others.

[Daiquiri Van-Derveld]

Spybot is dl'd, has run and found some stuff that LavaLight didnt. Big Green was right on...again!! :D

Everyone who has helped, thank you so very much. Its truly appreciated! *group hug*

[Dasquian Belargic]

which is quite odd because I ran SpyBot just now, then AdAware and AdAware picked out some things SB did o_O

[Daiquiri Van-Derveld]

I dont know why.......but Im right back where I was at when I first posted.

Slow response time, doesnt want to run cleanup or defrag, etc. :(

Now what?

[Figrin D'an]

Is it slow responding on everything, or just select applications?

[Daiquiri Van-Derveld]

Everything. It drags to the point I begin thinking its not going to open at all. :(

[Figrin D'an]

It could be a worm... there are some that can slow things down quite a bit... but it sounds more like a massive fragmentation issue.

Are you using the defrag built into XP, or are you using another product?

[Daiquiri Van-Derveld]

The built in defrag (and also the cleanup). You can dl different defrag-thingies?

[TheHolo.Net]

I'm starting to wonder if the disk cleanup wizard had you compress files that really shouldn't have been compressed and thusly slowed down your system. NTFS file compression (which the disk cleanup tool recommends usually) really doesn't do much good except to slow performance.

To see if files on the C drive are compressed: Open "My Computer", then Right Click on your C drive and look at the first tab that pops up. Near the bottm it should have a checkbox next to the words "Compress drive to save disk space" if that box is checked, uncheck it and click apply.

it may take a while to uncompress everything that could possibly be compressed, but it may be the problem since system files may have been compressed and the slow down could be caused by the uncompression/recompression process each time such files are needed for use.

[Daiquiri Van-Derveld]

I looked as you said but the only thing that popped up was the box that has the options like: Open...run as...etc. I didnt see what you were referring to :(

[imported_Marcus]

NTFS file compression (which the disk cleanup tool recommends usually) really doesn't do much good except to slow performance.

I'll argue that out in another thread, because I disagree. :p

Just looking over the continued isses here and I really dotn think it's the compression. I'm wondering however if the AntiVirus hasn't gone nuts. Is that on or off now?

[Daiquiri Van-Derveld]

I had it disabled but since the same issues have reoccured, I have it on.

[imported_Marcus]

Hmm..... disable it again.

[Brielle Acaana]

Auto-protection is now disabled :) No change :(

[TheHolo.Net]

Originally posted by SWFans.Net
To see if files on the C drive are compressed: Open "My Computer", then Right Click on your C drive and look at the first tab that pops up. Near the bottm it should have a checkbox next to the words "Compress drive to save disk space" if that box is checked, uncheck it and click apply. Oops, my directions were a little off. I missed a step there.


...

To see if files on the C drive are compressed: Open "My Computer", then Right Click on your C drive, click properties, and look at the first tab that pops up. Near the bottom it should have a checkbox next to the words "Compress drive to save disk space" if that box is checked, uncheck it and click apply.

...



And to Marcus: The reason I say NTFS file compression is pretty useless really, is that NTFS still has to set aside enough space to uncompress the compressed files or it cannot work with them. So all it really does is provide an illusion that it is saving space, when in fact it does nothing but slow access to them because it has to decompress them to use them, typically unnoticable, but if all system files were compressed it would be noticable. At least it was for me on the system I tried it out on.

[Daiquiri Van-Derveld]

No, the box is unchecked (about compression) but the one below that has a check in it.

[imported_Marcus]

Not quite, Mr SW-Fans, not quite. But we'll solve Diaq problem and I'll be happy to have a geek discussion on the subject, because I use compression to give a kick in performance :D

Diaq, are you sure? On my system that says the drive is encrypted, which really would screw up performance. I find it hard to believe yours would be.

Allright then. I think maybe we need to find out what exactly is working on your PC and what resources are being claimed. Right click the task bar, then click task manager. Processes and Performance tabs are what I would want to know about.

If you can take a screen shot of both tabs, I think that would be easier. Processes show what exactly is running, Perfomance shows how hard the machine is working.

[Daiquiri Van-Derveld]

Marcus, if I knew how to screen shot, Id be right on it :(

*will wait til Jenny comes on and force her to teach yet once again :)

[Morgan Evanar]

Press print screen, open photoshop/imageviewappthingy/paint, press paste.

[Brielle Acaana]

Morg figured it out for me :D

Marcus was right in suggesting the screen shots. After bungling them once (or twice), I got them sent off to Morg who saw that my cleanmgr (cleanup disk) was eating up all the CPU ...time?

Anyway, he had me close it out (I didnt know it was even running!) and things have definitely perked up! :crack

Thanks again to everyone who helped solve my problems! I owe you all a big favor! :)

[Dasquian Belargic]

I owe you all a big favor!

:mischief