Help please!

[Steve Burke]

After not using the internet for an hour or so I find I often can't get back on. Shutting down and restarting seems to cure the problem.

 

It's almost certainly my computer as Peggy's computer, that's linked to mine via wireless Broadband, has no such problem.

 

We're both using XP home without service pack 2 at present, although we intend installing it once we have all problems sorted out. Our browser is IE6 and we use Zone Alarm & Norton's AV.

 

A further clue may be that I can't get the automatic live updates from Norton's and have to update manually. However there's no problem with Peggy's computer despite mine being the main one and her's a slave. (Peggy says that's like this household! )

 

My computer also often slows right down despite regular housekeeping and extra AV and spyware checks.

 

Finally, my computer (despite being almost identical to Peggy's) has always taken very much longer to start up and shut down.

 

We've had innumerable problems since switching to Broadband, including Broadband flipping out periodically until we reconfigured the settings. However, all these problems have somehow now been solved and the above ones are hopefully the only ones left.

 

All ideas gratefully received.

[Newt]

Steve - check your event logs for errors or warnings that occur when you are having problems. Click on start, on run, key in eventvrw.msc, and OK. If you find any likely suspects, open one, click on the icon below the up/down arrows to send a text copy to the clipboard, and paste the results here. Do that for any that seem possible.

 

Also, do the start, run thing again, key in

code:

---

sfc /scannow

---

and OK. The system file checker will run quickly and pretty silently but if any system files are missing or damaged, it will replace them with good copies.

 

For the Norton problem, a couple of things. First off, it tends to not play nice with XP to the point that after being a user for around 10 years, I've gotten rid of it and gone with AVG. Lots less system load and working well. But if you want to keep it, try disconnecting from the internet, uninstalling Norton, rebooting and reinstalling it then get things up to data again. That might solve that issue for you.

 

After all of that is done, download a copy of Hijackthis v1.99 (and if you have an older one, overwrite it). Unzip it to a regular folder so not a temp folder and not to the desktop. Run a scan and create a log file then post the log here. It may give us some clues about your speed issues and some easy things to help speed you up a bit.

 

[ 23. December 2004, 01:47 AM: Message edited by: Newt ]

[Steve Burke]

Thanks. Newt. Peggy will come back to you having done what you've suggested.

 

I'd add that the Norton problem started only when we went on to Broadband.

[dunc85]

shouldn't that be eventvwr.msc :-)

[Newt]

Awk - thanks dunc85. I did a typo for sure.

 

eventvwr.msc it is.

[gonefishing]

when you say "it slows down"...are you talking about speed or response time?

 

a speedtest to guage any drop is at http://adslguide.org/tools/speedtest.asp

 

if its response time, this may point to a number of things...

 

1) AV can slow your machine down depending on its scanning setup

2) if your hard drive is stuffed full, temp files and swap space can get tight

3) your computer may be doing things in the backgound like compressing emails (if outlook is open) or indexing the hard drive (if you have that still switched on)

4) explorer may be running a large cache and norton is scanning it...i keep mine to about 20mb and that is fine

5) your dns cache may be large or nortons may have substituted your lmhosts file (but this last point would make most page accesses slower)

 

to help it ctrl alt del and look at the "processes" in the task manager and see if anything is chewing up your machines processor %.