Computer Problem, please help me

[YMIHERE]

OK... I downloaded both programs, thankyou very much YMIHERE and IAF... now, boys, can you help me with this:

When I tell Spybot to "search and destroy" it won't do it, it says "you need to install the detection updates first by using the integrated update or the manual updater." Do you know how to do this? I can't figure it out.

As for AD-AWARE, so far 35 new critical objects have been found.

There is a tab on Spybot that says "search for update". Make sure you downloaded the lastest version for this to work. I have version 1.4. If not you can go to Spybot's home page thru program.

I have a friend who have 257 sypware when he ran ad-aware.

 

[Iamforever]

There is a tab on Spybot that says "search for update". Make sure you downloaded the lastest version for this to work. I have version 1.4. If not you can go to Spybot's home page thru program.

I have a friend who have 257 sypware when he ran ad-aware.

dude, according to your link, those programs are not optimal. :dunno:

 

[YMIHERE]

dude, according to your link, those programs are not optimal. :dunno:

Yea I know. But they are free and next month they will be rated higher. I watch then and the reviews go up and down all the time. The top one now will go to the bottom, etc. They do work and are updated regularly.

 

[Iamforever]

Yea I know. But they are free and next month they will be rated higher. I watch then and the reviews go up and down all the time. The top one now will go to the bottom, etc. They do work and are updated regularly.

i was this close *squeezes thumb and index finger together* to downloading them.

 

[Iamforever]

well, my computer is still as fast as when i bought. so i dont need it.:tongue:

my secret: i only go to maybe 6 sites tops. although from my explorer days i know a lot of sites. download almost everything. :eek:

 

[Torre82]

LoL, you guys are swatting at flies tryin' ta solve somethin' ya dont know about!

Fox, if your comp is freezing spontaneously then a few things immediately pop to mind:


Is your computer case open? If so, close it.

Is there a cordless phone station, wireless modem, TV or radio within a foot or two from the computer? Move it away or turn the signal strength down. Signal strength should never be pretty high anyway for fear of neighbors riding free WiFi.

Drive space is never a problem for freezing. But the drives themselves ARE. If a hard drive is dying, then often it'll freeze the whole system. But eh.. you said the programs are still running? Keyboard and mouse freeze up, tho? Are they USB devices or do you plug into the PS2 ports? (round or rectangle on the PC side?) If they're USB devices then simply unplug.. replug. Plug and play. Took so long to get it right. lol (and according to Fox's box, they STILL arent perfect!)

Windows. Windows is always a problem. How long has it been since your last reformat? If it's at least a year, windows is probably bitin' ya in the ass for not burning all those songs 'n porn to CD/DVD and doing a hard reformat. Yeah, I know.. it's tough waiting those 20-40 minutes and losing all your preferences.

Spyware, Adware..sure they're a risk, but you'll generally know if you HAVE THEM! Random popups? Wallpaper changes to an ad? Homepage set to something suspicious on its own? Yes? Spyware *MIGHT* get rid of it but so many spyware progs can embed themselves in windows executables and ensure their own lil lives with the Windows-File-Protection BS that keeps you from permanently screwing over your system in case you decide to free up 600 megs by deleting /Windows. lol!

How to tell if you have a virus.. your system's hard disk runs all the time. Your HD access lamp flashes lots more than it used to. Opening ANY executable (.EXE) on your system, regardless of what it is.. takes much longer and performs like total crap. (Virus spreading itself, deleting something, etc etc)

Firefox? It's nice and all but depends on your PC. If your internet explorer runs slow.. (AND I DONT MEAN SLOWER THAN IT USED TO WHEN YOU INSTALLED IT! That's just windows bloat that happens over time. Between formats. Etc) anyway, if your IE runs slow than FireFox will run even slower. It caches pages, runs extra plugins..blah blah, you'll see if you try it. It's not worse than IE, and in many ways it's better. But it's also not a rare thing to see pages that work perfectly in IE.. but F up the stylesheets, formatting.. page layouts.. blah blah.. in Firefox. Less so with my fave, Opera.. but only IE is IE. Sad as it may be.

ALSO! Just try wiggling the connections, reconnecting.. etc. It's not unheard of to just have a bad mouse Or G_d forbid your HD's connectors are going bad. Hey. It happens. My current mobo has a twitchy keyboard input. My prior computer didnt care for USB so much.. probably a bad BIOS flash, that. :shrug: I havent had it in awhile, tho.

 

[Iamforever]

Firefox? It's nice and all but depends on your PC. If your internet explorer runs slow.. (AND I DONT MEAN SLOWER THAN IT USED TO WHEN YOU INSTALLED IT! That's just windows bloat that happens over time. Between formats. Etc) anyway, if your IE runs slow than FireFox will run even slower. It caches pages, runs extra plugins..blah blah, you'll see if you try it. It's not worse than IE,

wrong. im living proof. when i first downloaded firefox, i didnt like the layout. so i went back and forth. explorer was way slower. and since i have used firefox, i have not caught a thing. maybe firefox is my lucky charm, but i will never use the internet without firefox. even on someone else's computer. in fact, i made my wife use it, and like me, she didnt like it at first because of the browser layout. explorer does have a better looking browser, but the point is she loves firefox too and wont use explorer any more. explorer is evil.

 

[YMIHERE]

Fox, its sounds like your computer may be overheating. Keep air vents clear and clean. Also if you have a notebook computer what is it siting on. I had a client who's Dell overheated because of the tablecloth it was on. Computer have to have air like people.

 

[Torre82]

wrong. im living proof. when i first downloaded firefox, i didnt like the layout. so i went back and forth. explorer was way slower. and since i have used firefox, i have not caught a thing. maybe firefox is my lucky charm, but i will never use the internet without firefox. even on someone else's computer. in fact, i made my wife use it, and like me, she didnt like it at first because of the browser layout. explorer does have a better looking browser, but the point is she loves firefox too and wont use explorer any more. explorer is evil.

You're not exactly living proof. When you first downloaded Firefox, you had already been using Internet Explorer for a while. So it had already *bloated up* with cookies, cache files, plugins, logins, certificates and the like.

Thats saying like hey, my FRESH intel mac starts up faster than your Intel windows XP-which has been installed for six months, a couple games and plenty of web browsing. Bloat kills. Not even to mention page optimizations and HTML differences. Shockwave may load faster on browser X, but yahoo.com loads faster on browser Z!

Try something like.. these:
http://firefoxpluginreviews.blogspot.com/

Fox, its sounds like your computer may be overheating. Keep air vents clear and clean. Also if you have a notebook computer what is it siting on. I had a client who's Dell overheated because of the tablecloth it was on. Computer have to have air like people.

Oh dammit, I was gonna mention that too. Heh, I overclock my PC and cool it with nothing short of a room fan. Yeah ya gotta clean the dust out every few months but you cant beat the performance gain.

 

[Member2019]

Could be several things ...

Fox, it could be several things.
A couple could be software.
A few others could be hardware.

Software

There are two ways to bring a computer to its knees. Eat up the processor time or eat up the memory. The former is obvious, the processor is too busy. The latter is less obvious, but has to do with memory being "paged in/out" aka "thrashing" -- whereby all the software needs more memory than is available, so it's using disk (which is much slower) as "extra, virtual memory." "Thrashing" is easily noticeable because your disk is going crazy (with constant access).

What causes your processor and/or memory to be over-utilized is what you need to find out.

Buggy programs can have "memory leaks" whereby they use memory, but don't return it when they no longer use it, only to come back and ask for more. But more commonly due to the design of Windows (which was never designed for the Internet), a great amount of spyware comes through various Internet programs (e.g., Internet Explorer and Outlook [Express]). They eat up memory and/or processor time.

As many pointed out, you want to get some Spyware detection utilities. It's more than just anti-virus. Unfortunately, as Microsoft publicly admitted 2 years ago, many spyware programs can "hide" from these scanners once they infect the system. The only way to remove them (let alone detect them in some cases) is to boot the system outside of the installed version of Windows (e.g., using a Windows Pre-Execution, WinPE, or Linux-based security CD/DVD), so the programs don't go resident.

AdAware is well regarded, and most of the for-pay programs don't offer much. Microsoft has licensed another program it now includes for download with any Windows XP SP2 update as well. If you post what those programs find, we can help you further.

But in reality, in the case of my wife who is very computer savvy and runs Windows XP, we have caught 2 pieces of spyware that were NOT detected by any anti-virus or anti-spyware software. The ONLY reason I caught them was because my Snort Network Intrusion Detection System (IDS), which runs on a separate, Linux-based network security appliance, caught some "interesting traffic" going out. Stuff like this won't be caught by the "infected host," despite what Norton and others try to tell you.

NOTE: Now I don't recommend anyone dive into installing an IDS in your house, although I do highly recommend some "turn-key" security appliances for even small businesses, and the due-diligence of taking 5-10 minutes to check the logs every day. I've had this debate with many clients, and it's one of the reasons I avoid consulting with most smaller companies. It's actually not that hard, and the few colleagues that I've convinced to run some sort of security appliance with IDS have prevented a lot of data theft in the end.

E.g., Valve had all of the Half-Life 2 code stolen because even they didn't have at least a simple IDS installed, and believed their network and host firewall combination "protected" them. The absolute worst thing is to be compromised and not know it -- when you've been compromised, the intruders do NOT merely post a message saying, "we're here." They watch your networks and systems for months, and see what they can get. If you're lucky, they don't do anything but "rent out" your processor time (which also slows down your system) to non-US/non-Western European companies willing to pay for "bots."

Hardware

Cooling and power are the two things that will always bring down a system over time. Cooling because of the mechanical aspects, the most likely to fail of any system component. Hard drives are also mechanical, so they will degrade over time as well, but fans are much more likely to. With today's thermal dissipation requirements on integrated circuits (ICs) like the central processor unit (CPU) or graphics processor unit (GPU -- on the video card) measured at 100W or above (imagine holding your hand on a 100W incandecent bulb), you can't afford a fan to fail.

Power because the efficiency of any power supply drops over time with usage, and at some point when the various voltage rails (typically +3.3, +5 and +12V DC) fail to deliver the needed current to various components, the voltage will drop on those lines. 2 out of 3 times, when I see a troubled, older PC with "hangs," it's typically the power supply. Especially if the system runs "for 15-30 minutes" and then "hangs," and will only run for a "few more minutes" when you reboot. That's because the efficiency of the power supply drops as the system heats up, and even just a few degrees difference internally can mean a drop of an amp or two on a voltage rail.

So ... to verify it is not a hardware issue, consider opening up the case when you turn on the unit. Listen and check if all fans are running -- the fan in the power supply, the fan on your CPU, and any fan on your GPU (if you have a separate, add-in GPU expansion card that has one). Several types of fan bearings also smell like "maple surup" when they fail, so if you smell something like that (it's distinctly different than "burned out" resistors, capacitors, etc...), then that's a sign of a fan failure.

From there, see if you have a PC technician that is a friend and he can load you a power supply and possibly install it. Take care to note that older Compaq systems (and even a few, newer Dell ones) don't always use the standard "ATX 1.0" 20-pin (and some newer ones have an "ATX 2.0" 24-pin) power supply. I've even seen a few PC manufacturers change to SSI EPS12V power supplies on their desktop systems -- even though they are really for servers (long story) -- so they don't have to have separate ATX v. EPS components. There are slight differences there as well.

Most "white box" PCs just use ATX, and in many cases (depending on the CPU/GPU power requirements), even an older ATX 1.0 20-pin will work for a ATX 2.0 24-pin mainboard (motherboard/systemboard). Most modern systems carry most of the current over the separate, dedicated 4-pin "P4" connector, which nearly all ATX power supplies have these days.

 

[Member2019]

MS IE v. Firefox (yet again)

Windows. Windows is always a problem. How long has it been since your last reformat? If it's at least a year, windows is probably bitin' ya in the ass for not burning all those songs 'n porn to CD/DVD and doing a hard reformat. Yeah, I know.. it's tough waiting those 20-40 minutes and losing all your preferences.

Yeah, even if you save your "Profile" (or use a "Roaming Profile" on a network), that profile can be "infected."
UNIX/Linux is much better, and you can selectively "delete" resource configuration files -- e.g., only those for Firefox.
The registry is the stupidiest thing Microsoft ever invented (don't get me started).

In fact, I'm really wanting to smack Miguel deIcaza for putting more and more into GConf (GNOME is a popular UNIX/Linux desktop system, and its GConf is getting too "registry-like" for my tastes as of late).

Spyware, Adware..sure they're a risk, but you'll generally know if you HAVE THEM! Random popups? Wallpaper changes to an ad? Homepage set to something suspicious on its own? Yes? Spyware *MIGHT* get rid of it but so many spyware progs can embed themselves in windows executables and ensure their own lil lives with the Windows-File-Protection BS that keeps you from permanently screwing over your system in case you decide to free up 600 megs by deleting /Windows. lol!

Most of that crap can be solved instantly by not running Internet Explorer.
The second Microsoft introduced "Active Desktop," I pointed out the severe security risks by allowing IE to change all sorts of user setup.
Did they listen to me (among thousands of other, screaming Microsoft professionals?), hell no.
And today MS IE -- at the root of every single program (including Windows itself, and especially Outlook [Express]) built with Visual Studio 5.0 or later -- is the greatest "hacker toolkit" ready-to-use on 100% of Windows systems.
Fuck you very much Microsoft -- we tried to warn you! But you were too busy trying to fuck over Netscape.

Firefox? It's nice and all but depends on your PC. If your internet explorer runs slow.. (AND I DONT MEAN SLOWER THAN IT USED TO WHEN YOU INSTALLED IT! That's just windows bloat that happens over time. Between formats. Etc) anyway, if your IE runs slow than FireFox will run even slower. It caches pages, runs extra plugins..blah blah, you'll see if you try it. It's not worse than IE, and in many ways it's better. But it's also not a rare thing to see pages that work perfectly in IE.. but F up the stylesheets, formatting.. page layouts.. blah blah.. in Firefox. Less so with my fave, Opera.. but only IE is IE. Sad as it may be.

Huh?
First off, IE starts faster because it's always running in all Windows NT versions from 4.0 on-ward (5.0=2000, 5.1=XP/2000, 6.0=Vista).
It's from the "you can access everything directly" MS-DOS 7 world (7.0=95/95A, 7.1=95B/95C/98/98SE), using a constant shunt between Real86 and Protected386 mode known as "386Enhanced Mode," which was the way all non-NT Windows versions work (including 95/98, despite the marketing to the contrary).
That means MS IE is running at the core of the OS, 100% of the time.

So yes, Firefox has to "start up as a separate program" and that adds time, uses more memory, etc...
But after you load a few sites and a few tabs, Firefox is much leaner than MS IE, especially if you turn off various things.
The real "benefit" of Firefox is that you do NOT have that "hacker toolkit" in the MS IE core libraries of the OS, which really goes a long way to preventing spyware from getting into your OS!

And unlike MS IE, things will work in Firefox if you are a "regular user" and not an "administrator."

99% of the security issues in the Windows (NT-based) world -- including in Vista -- are due to the fact that you have to run as "administrator" for things to work.
The NT-based Windows kernel/OS design is not bad at all, but because Microsoft's own tool/application programmers utterly ignored the OS/API security model, it's utterly useless.
That's why they introduced the "UAC" in NT 6.0 "Vista," because Microsoft can't get their own programmers to write "disciplined, privileged separated" code, so they "pass the buck" to the user.

Which is why the UAC is utterly useless in the end too.

Especially compared to UNIX systems, including Apple MacOS X, which have always developed applications on the basic foundation that you do NOT have access to everything by default.
MS IE was written for MS-DOS 7 OSes -- namely Windows 95/98/Me -- that have no security privilege levels whatsoever.
As such, that "infected" NT-based OSes -- namely 2000, XP and now Vista -- which means many core features/compatibility abide by no security privilege levels whatsoever.

What does all that mean? The UAC is nagging the fuck out of you, just like the Apple commercial visualizes with the "secret service-looking guy."

Meanwhile, all of use UNIX and MacOS X wennies run even games as non-privileged users, given only basic, direct access to the GPU, joystick, etc... when we physically log into the local display/input, but not anything else.
And don't even get me started on DirectX (especially when OpenGL ran "securely" on Windows NT before we got that MS-DOS 7 abomination known as Windows 95).

 

[Iamforever]

You're not exactly living proof. When you first downloaded Firefox, you had already been using Internet Explorer for a while. So it had already *bloated up* with cookies, cache files, plugins, logins, certificates and the like.

Thats saying like hey, my FRESH intel mac starts up faster than your Intel windows XP-which has been installed for six months, a couple games and plenty of web browsing. Bloat kills. Not even to mention page optimizations and HTML differences. Shockwave may load faster on browser X, but yahoo.com loads faster on browser Z!

all this technical jargon is going in one ear and out the other.:1orglaugh

im going to leave it as this: i have faith in firefox. i believe in firefox. i have no faith in explorer. i ran into many problems with explorer that hasnt happened yet with firefox. the most noticeable for me is frozen windows. :2 cents:

 

[Member2019]

More poor MS IE assumptions that don't affect Firefox ...

You're not exactly living proof. When you first downloaded Firefox, you had already been using Internet Explorer for a while. So it had already *bloated up* with cookies, cache files, plugins, logins, certificates and the like.

Whoa!
First off, WTF do "logins" or "certificates" have to do with performance?
Secondly, many of the issues of cookies and cache files and what not have performance issues on IE but not the same on Firefox!
You couldn't have made my point better!

There is a reason why Spyglass (all versions of IE) and the Gecko (Mozilla v5/Firefox) engines are respected differently.
Spyglass Explorer was the 3rd best product, one that Microsoft could afford, and it has changed little -- not even IE 7 is any different than 6.
Gecko took the #1 product, Mozilla v4 (Netscape Communicator), and open sourced it, then the open source community addressed performance, security, etc...

Furthermore, the worlds of difference in how Microsoft addresses exploits and the Mozilla team addresses there's is why I use the latter.
Don't get me started there!

Thats saying like hey, my FRESH intel mac starts up faster than your Intel windows XP-which has been installed for six months, a couple games and plenty of web browsing.

MacOS X is BSD UNIX and Safari is KHTML (Konqueror, Linux KDE's browser).
Even MS IE on MacOS X is not compatible with MS IE from Windows (Win32), and doesn't read a lot of MS IE-only (really Win32-only) sites.
If you're running MS IE on MacOS X it is no comparison to MS IE on Windows!
Hell, it's far more like MS IE for Solaris (SunOS 5, Sun's UNIX) than MS IE for Windows.

Bloat kills. Not even to mention page optimizations and HTML differences. Shockwave may load faster on browser X, but yahoo.com loads faster on browser Z!
Try something like.. these:
http://firefoxpluginreviews.blogspot.com/

Again, MS IE -- at its base -- is built-into Windows.
But as you pointed out, after awhile, you're running core spyware at the core of the Windows OS so it does "slow down."
I.e., when you start Windows, the spyware is already loaded and running on your Windows platform!

Oh dammit, I was gonna mention that too. Heh, I overclock my PC and cool it with nothing short of a room fan. Yeah ya gotta clean the dust out every few months but you cant beat the performance gain.

I don't try to outsmart fellow EEs and induce transconductance while causing permanent damage to my hardware.
I like to use my ICs for 5+ years and rotate old desktops into servers or appliances and eventually donate them to the poor years down the road.

 

[Member2019]

Last comment on MS IE (Mac/Solaris v. Windows), and why Firefox isn't more popular

im going to leave it as this: i have faith in firefox. i believe in firefox. i have no faith in explorer. i ran into many problems with explorer that hasnt happened yet with firefox. the most noticeable for me is frozen windows. :2 cents:

I think he might have a Mac.
As such, MS IE on Mac is nothing like MS IE on Windows.
In fact, MS IE on Mac (as well as Solaris) is largely standards-compliant, and it doesn't integrate into the core OS.

Firefox is open source, and well trusted by fellow developers and -- even more so -- security experts.
The only thing missing from Firefox is a good "administration kit" for enterprises, something I've harped on regularly.
There are some older kits from Netscape, but they largely don't address various features.

That's the only reason why Firefox hasn't caught on with most enterprises, although every Fortune 100 company I've worked at openly allows Firefox.

 

[Wainkerr99]

Hi my turn:
Would someone help me? I don't know what I've done - except clear all cookies and browsing history etc on the control panel Internet and Network connection Internet options option.

What has happened is I have somehow disabled the back/forward button on the top of each page.

I cannot bookmark links as they simply do not appear at the top of the page. I can go to a page, sure, but the link at the top of the Firefox browser, where you copy from or which you Bookmark, doesn't show.

It also means I cannot go back. The green back arrow does not appear at the moment.

How can I fix this? Puhleeze. I'll give you some pics- just as soon as I can actually see a link up there.

Thanks. Danke schön. Merci. Graci. Gracias.

 

[Wainkerr99]

O.K. I have restored default navigation for the Freeones page. I have the link back and the navigation arrow. I did this by going to View, Customize, restore defaults.

 

[Wainkerr99]

Wish I'd had a bit of attention. Pout. Sulk.

 

[ChefChiTown]

Can one of the FreeOnes Team Members change bigbadbrody's username to bigBANNEDbrody? You know, just for shits and giggles.