Ryuneo

Hi

Could you peeps offer any suggestions on what this problem could be with my pc? In the last few days my system as really slowed down to the point of stopping. I have 1gb ram and 140gb hd, p4 and top graphics card. i`m running norton av to check. If anybody thinks they know what the prob could be please do get in touch.

Many thanks

Ryan

Stroker

Bad habits my woman has that slows down her machine:

1. Bad surfing habits. She just seems to get all of the those little bad thing running in the background from surfing. You know, things like Gator junk.

2. Bells-n-whistles offered by her OS. Stupid mouse pointer tricks, lots of colours and anti-aliasing everywhere, scrolling, fading, system sounds - all of that kind of junk.

3. Other OS junk. She has an HP, and HP has a bunch of stuff in the background that she doesn't need. Plus she keeps printer and camera junk loaded all the time.

4. Downloads and tempfile crap. I don't know how she does it, but she manages to explode her system temp folder with downloads and various other temp junk. One guy I knew, this was the *major* factor in his machine slow down. He had a very bad habit of turning off his machine with out a proper shutdown. Once his system temp was cleared of just over a gig of junk, he got system performance back.

When she's not looking or gets fed up with poor speed, I turn some junk off and do some harddrive cleaning. Although, I haven't taken a romp through her registry in awhile.
It helps until her bad habits catch up with her again.

Erik

1/ Empty temporary internet files
2/ empty temp folder
3/ run Spybot search and destroy (free) (spyware) and keep it active from now on.
4/ full check with an updated virus killer
5/ get rid of everything you don't really need on the hdd and back it up on cdroms (the rest also)
6/ If you run XP, regularly save a restore pint so you can do system restore. If not, and at your own risk: run a registrycleaner.
7/ run defrag


You *can* change the cluster size if running NTFS on XP(pro?) but, no insult meant, when you ask this question here, I wouldn't try that.

lindaw

Yes listen to Erik and Stroker. I just ran into this type of thing with a family member. They had active virus software on the systems but because they used IE all the time they got hit. Spybot cleaned most of it off but to be safe we just wiped the drives and reinstalled.

Doing a clean install is your call but I would research anything Spybot or the virus software finds to see how easy or hard it is going to be to fix. Check into Zone Alarm. Wonderful program!! It will alert you of anything trying to get out from your computer or anything trying to gain access to your computer from the internet. You can set different levels of access on this as well.

Good luck! :B

JoeD

Also keep an eye on your running tasks: ctrl+shift+escape (taskmanager) and go to the tab called "processes'. Check the column 'CPU' to figure out which programs uses the most CPU cycles and slows down the system. Also check the tab named 'performance'; CPU usage should swing between 0-8% if you don't have anything special running. Check available Phyical Memory or Page File usage; could be a sign of a memory leak if you have less memory over time. Also defrag your hard drive, make sure that you have at least a few 100 MB free space.

Protection advice

- Install Kaspersky 5 Pro virus scanner. Tests has proven that it catches most viruses of all scanners in the market and it also updates its signatures every 3 hours. It also has one of the best heuristic scanners, which means that it can catch a lot of new viruses for which it doesn't have a signature yet. It's also one of the best scanners for scanning inside archives, it supports an amaizing 700+ archive formats. E-mail scanning, protection against keyloggers, macros, etc, it's all included. Not the fastest scanner though and you'll need at least a 1.5+ Ghz machine, but that's the logical downside of its extensive tests. You can of cause always disable on demand scanning and scan manually. AVK and MKS_Vir are less known, but belong in the top 3 after reading several tests. My experiences are the same after trying them out on a test bed of 1,000+ viruses. (For some reason East-European virus scanner manufacturers are the best in the market).
Also run a scheduled full scan during the night. You might consider to use an online scanner if you prefer not to buy a new scanner.

- Install Sygate Firewall Pro or Agnitum Outpost, they work great, stable and are not so much of a resource hog like most other programs. If you're having a highspeed connection, use a router, it serves as an extra protection (hardware firewall)

- Install Webroot Spy Sweeper. Type "Spy Sweeper" review in any search engine to see that it's always in 1st place. It has shields for favorites, homes page, hijack attempts, tracking cookies, memory, installation of spyware, host shield, startup shield, ad sites, messenger, etc. It blocks about 26,000 spyware programs and tracking cookies. No anti spyware software is perfect, so make sure that you also have Spybot Research & Destroy and Ad-Aware installed (free). Spyware Eliminator is also good.

- Update the OS with the latest patches. Close as many programs as possible to avoid problems after installing a patch.
If you have XP, make sure you update to SP2 in August(?), because it contains some very important security updates.

- Check security options in IE and Outlook Express or consider alternative browser or E-mail program

- Use the a great program like Mailwasher Pro to keep unwanted E-mail out. Make sure that your ISP offer spam and virus protection for its email service. Consider free E-mail like Yahoo mail or hotmail that offer this kind of protection.

- Avoid opening attachments in E-mails, avoid funware (screensavers, little free games, explorer toolbars and things like that).

- Use long passwords that contain at least a symbol and number, change passwords on a regular basis and never write them down. If you want to keep some log, write them in a program like Passkeeper; http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/fil...id,3176,00.asp
It's free, doesn't need to be installed and huges high encryption. You can put it on a floppy or usb memory stick (it's only 85kb) so that you can use it where ever you are.

Don't worry too much about security, it's not all that bad as it seems, as long as you DO what you have to do to make your system more secure ((and that's the problem many times, people don't protect themselves enough).

... and there is a lot more to it, but I have to run now, c'ya around fellow photoshoppers

lindaw

Great advice JoeD! :}

Erik

Another prog that seems to be very good working is ErrorNuker (do a google search for it).
It is "free": you can try it out on your system, but to have it make the repairs (and there are many, even on a freshly installed OS), you have to pay.

A friend of mine who is pc technician uses it all the time and never had problems with it.
It detects wrong shortcuts, dll problems, etc etc.

Thanks JoeD: guess I'll have to get me a router. Is that hard to install and configure?

JoeD

Of course it's always good to read the manual, but it's not all that difficult, even for users who never had one. WAN connection needs to be connected to ISP, other ones connect to workstations, uplink connection is needed if you want to add an extra switch or hub.
In my case I use my browser to login to the router.
Instead of typing an URL I need to type the local IP-address of the router, I log in and then I can browse through the configuration as if it were a web site.

It all comes to;

a) entering your local IP-address and subnet mask
b) connection type
c) DNS server
d) ISP logon name/password
e) blocking those ports that you don't use

(I'm just ignoring now a few other settings that aren't really needed to get the router up and running)

The router will automatically log in to the ISP servers and all you have to do is use the address of your router as the IP-address for your gateway (TCP/IP settings).

So in the end it will look something like this;

IP: 192.168.15.1
subnet: 255.255.255.0 (C-class network, max 254 workstations)
Gateway (=router): 192.168.15.100

A software firewall can crash or a hacker can bring it down.

A hardware firewall is much safer. It's for example very easy to block Netbios (used for file and printer sharing).
You can also easlily block all the ports that you don't use, making it impossible for others (users or hackers) to make use these ports.

Here's a list with port numbers and what they might be used for;

http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers

80 for example is used for browsing, 21 for FTP

Most software firewalls will ask you to authorize a connection and will mention the port. You can use that same information to block that particular port in your router.

My router can only filter 5 port ranges. if I would like to protect myself for example to avoid outbound connections (trojans/backdoors) that use anything other than port 80 (browser), then I have to add two ranges in my router;
0-79
81-65535

And another good reason (other than security), is when you have more than one user making use of the same internet connection.
Sharing internet using routers is safer, a lot more stable and easier to maintain than sharing an internet connection using a software sollution.

And routers are not all that expensive; I have seen them between $50-$75

If you decide a router Erik, just let me know and I'm more than willing to help you with any further questions you might have (use Persnal Messages).

But now I'm of finishing my installation of XP. All these 1001 security updates of the last 2 years have created some glitches here and there and I'm reinstalling everything from scratch using a a Windows XP SP2 CD (made it myself using slipstreaming).

I should be done by the end of the day... I hope!

Erik

New topic: slipstreaming.
It was explained to me long ago, and I even downloaded the method but at that time, I saved on diskettes. As I don't have a diskette reader anymore, II gave them to someone.

Can you explain how it works?
I have a WinXPPro SP1 CD and I downloaded the 266MB SP2 corporate version. I'd love to create an XPPro SR1+2 CDRom.

As for the router: thanks, the moment I have one, and have read the manual, I'll ask (may take a month or so as very soon now I'm of on an exhibition tour in France.

sPECtre

Erik: see this guide. Looks like exactly what you need!

http://www.msfn.org/articles.php?act...showarticle=49