PC check up

Hi - my PC at home seems to be running a bit more slowly than it used to, it also takes a lot longer to come to life when I switch it on, and there are various other little oddities that I've noticed (like freezing or when I am sending only 1 email on Outlook it now says Send/Receive 50% but it used to say Send/Receive 100%).


I'm not sure if these are things I should be worried about. Nothing causes a major problem for me, but I figure it could do with a having a check up.


It's about 4 years old and I've got Norton Antivirus which says it has spyware etc as well and it is always "clean" - just wondering if there is something else wrong. Anyone/any service that you know of who can check it out - reliable/trustworthy and doesn't cost the earth?


Thanks!

http://www.asiaxpat.com.hk/promos/sensecomputers/

Hi. If you still needed some help with the computer, I do a bit of freelance Tech Support sometimes (PC's with Windows operating systems) for a very reasonable fee. Feel welcome to contact me at my HK mobile number, Don: 6104-9558, or email me at: lonewolfdon@yahoo.com , and we can arrange the details.

I had the chance to do a live comparision of Spybot vs AdAware and found AdAware more up to date.


My father-in-law has over 20 years of computing experience and is both helpless and hopeless. Time does not necessarily equate with quality. ;^)

Not to worry -


Someone should run msconfig on cheesygrin's computer and see if unloading some of the background progrms helps with the perceived slow down.

Be very careful on non-MS programs that claim to clean up that which MS and other programs have created (in the registry and the various config programs that msconfig will display for you). I once ran one of the commercial "clean up" programs on either Win95 or 98 (don't recall which), and it came up with loads of "extranious" files that it proposed to delete. Rather than simply click on okay and let it do its thing, I had it display all of the files it was going to delete - and it was a good thing that I did check - my computer would not have run had I let the clean up program remove the "junk". I was doing tech support for Win 95/98 at the time, so I knew what many of the files targeted did, and what would have happened had I clicked on ok.


Run msconfigcleanup but carefully examine what it proposes to do, before you click on ok. Alternatively while running msconfig you can disable the various programs that msconfig shows are running, and determine the configuration you want. You can then select an option to run that configuration as the default, without any more prompts from XP, and you don't delete anything. THe advantage of doing this is that if you eventually learn that you have disable something that you want (program xyz no longer runs for example), you can simply go back into msconfig, re-enable the desired TSR and you are back in business (for program xyz). If you run msconfigcleanup, getting a damaged program to run will probably require that you reinstall missing files, or reinstall programs, or ????? Yes, msconfigcleanup may try to play nice and backup everything that it removes so that it is recoverable - in theory.


Better to be cautious and proceed slowly when tinkering. Msconfig displays settings in various configuration files, it doesn't gather anything, just displays information.

I have come across many cases where Norton doesnt work when windows has problems. Suggest you do a free online scan at http://housecall.trendmicro.com if that doesn;t work have some other fixes for you..


Hope this helps

It would seem to me that MSconfigcleanup is a "real gem" - at least with the programs listed in MSconfig you can go back and re-enable things, whereas if as you say msoconfigcleanup only removes things from msconfig, by my way of thinking you don't get much of anything, but a loss of information. It would really be a challenge to enable the programs that are no longer listed in msconfig.

I've been using StartRight for almost 2 months and quite like the little goodie. It often slows down the system when there're too many programs loading at once. StartRight launches the programs at different timing (customizable). I saw great performance immediately once I downloaded the software. It's a no brainer to set up too!


http://www.download.com/StartRight/3000-2084_4-10550178.html

Windows enables many services that you don't actually need and by disabling them your system will be a lot faster!


But make a full backup of the system before playing around in the services!