I assume you are not short of memory? When first installed, a low memory system apparently works fine. Then you add more and more software until it has to swap like mad. At his stage you can get a "swapping storm" leading to a blue screen of death as something overflows.
I've recently given a new lease of life to some old PCs for others by simply installing extra memory from Crucial. (So I could return it if it didn't work, but haven't had to do that yet...)
Thanks for all the replies. Sounds like the answer to my original question is "no" then!
I've already done most of the tricks and tests people have suggested (but not all, and I'll follow those up).
I'm intrigued by the idea of running a virtual machine though. Currently I have several networked machines running XP Home for family use; they are all fairly old and low-spec ones, and the idea of buying one new decent one to use as a server for the others sounds attractive. I've also had positive experience of using VMs from an employer, both working from home over the internet and working in the office. It had never occurred to me to be able to reproduce that at home - I thought it was pretty high-level, and expensive business software etc. Is it a realistic proposition for an only averagely competent Windows home user to get involved with? Anyone got any useful links to share?
Thanks David
Yeah, did that. Came up with a couple of odd registry entries, but nothing more. I'll add it to all the other things that are constantly monitoring my every move :-) Do you think Spybot and Adaware are worth keeping? Zone Alarm seems to be ever more intrusive too.
Getting a VM up and running is simple to anyone with any understanding of PCs.
The difficult bits are making the right choice of VM software (Virtual PC from MS, VMWare or Virtual Box) - - keeping costs sensible, and not transgressing any licenses. (Or at least, not such that you cause yourself a problem.)
I have two PCs at present. One laptop dedicated to XP. And a desktop that I only ever use via Remote Desktop - which runs Vista for 'research' purposes. I keep meaning to get some other operating systems on that machine - but have not yet decided what way round to do things.
Would happily tell you more but I am a bit out of touch with it on the Windows front.
How old is it, and is there a common theme to the crashing ? - I had a system that was getting increasingly random crashes, and despite building quite a few systems over the years, I was struggling to diagnose the cause.
It turned out to be bad capacitors around the processor - which was quite common at one point, as a lot of manufacturers used a cheap chinese clone of the electrolyte from a stolen formula, but was missing one crucial ingredient :-}
If you're comfortable taking the side off, look for any bulging, however slight around the big capacitors around the CPU - one or two might be ever so slightly "domed" or leaking, and it only takes one faulty one for the system to keel over randomly.
Depending on the mode of failure, if it happens within a couple of hours of booting up, it's worth using a linux boot CD and seeing if the system crashes with that running - if so, it's likely to be hardware related, and harder to diagnose...
Other than that it's hard to know where to start - what software is installed, and if you say Norton or McAfee we reserve the right to laugh :-p
Have you noticed any potentially "malevolent" behaviour which might indicate a worm / virus / malware / spyware ?
You have to pay for the end-to-end functionality. Why not get System Mechanic, which is - AFAIK - currently free?
In that case, your security was seriously lacking :-p
Virtualbox is a good one to go for - i've got about 9 "machines" set up under my install of it.
Spybot S&D and Adaware are both worth keeping, but might be a little bit of overkill. As someone who's used Spybot for years, I tend to recommend that to people, and have some lame instructions on setting it up on my website
I don't think so - SPybot *found* some extraordinary things. That's security in action :-)
For fun I just installed virtualbox on my Vista desktop. Then created an ubuntu VM. Ran it - it worked. All done remotely from my XP laptop.
Managed all of that, including the downloads, within the time partner was on the phone to her sister. Nothing difficult. Instructions readily available on the net.
Not quite - ideally they shouldn't have been able to get onto his system in the first place.
This example is not security in action, it's security after the fact.
Simple steps might have reduced the potential damage that may have been caused, such as:
1) SpywareBlaster - blocks known activex exploits 2) Firefox - far less prone to being hacked than IE in real life 3) Spybot S&D (properly configured) - hosts file & immunize(immunize on Spybot S&D is similar to the protection offered by SpywareBlaster, but it does no harm having both on the system in case one catches something the other doesn't)
In message , Colin Wilson writes
I seem to have a problem with FF atm
takes half a minute to load, even after having removed and reinstalled it
IE and chrome seem fine
Sadly that is exactly the wrong way round.
Servers don't need huge power or RAM
Desktops do. The biggest chewers of CPU cycles and RAM are graphics intensive apps - video stuff, web browsers running scripts and the like.
Grappng data off a disk and spitting it out of an ethernet port can be dne by a cvverty low spec machine. I have an entry level motherboard and 512Mbyte of Ram and its more than adequate.
Wheras to run a decent video screen you need at least a GHZ of processor and at least a gig of ram, maybe more.
Get an old machine witha decent amont of ram, get linux going for fun, and see how you go.
They're mainly going to find tracking cookies which aren't really a problem and are going to be deleted if you use CCleaner daily anyway. I only have an old 800mhz Pentium with 256mb ram so anything that takes up resources I could be doing with for other things is a real pain so I only run anti-malware programs when I know I have a problem. It would be nice to have a decent anti-virus program running in the background all the time but they slow things down too much for me. I just keep the browser settings as secure as I can, run CCleaner frequently and keep an eye on the running processes in Task Manager. If I get a virus so be it but I actually quite enjoy pitting my wits against them and rooting them out manually rather than with anti-malware programs. It invariably teaches you something new about pcs each time at least. Just keep your important data backed up somewhere and there's not much malware can do that's impossible to recover from. Even keeping copies of your data on the same disk but a different partition like the D drive helps because I've never come across a virus that infected anything other than on the C partition. Usually they lurk in the Windows\System32 directory so it helps to know what should and should not be in there.
The other program I use every day is Ztree which is a Dos style file and directory manager for decrepit individuals like me who grew up with pcs when they first came out and can't get on with the newfangled Windoze way of doing things. It lets me see what's on my disk more easily, sort files by name, date, extension etc, search for them by partial name with templates such as *xxx*.*, change file attributes or date stamps and edit text files.
Yes, everyone immediately thinks 'software' cos its Windows.
However crashes can as easily be caused by random hardware corruption.
I got some RAM off ebay for this machine. (Mac G4) It started to go really flakey, and I thought the disk had gione..then I grabbed a new disk and reinstalled, and the problems mostly went, but shit still kept happening. So I started removing one memory stick at a time. with one out, I had a stable system. That's in the bin now.
The other issue is drive failure. 2-5 years i all a heap IDE drve worked fairly hard can take.
And never forget fans..again this machine stopped working last summer. took it outside and blew a ton of fluff out of the power supply and the CPU fans. Machine now runs fine.
So before reinstalling ANYTHING. check those puffy caps,. reseat all memory, run memtest stuff, clean out the fans of all dust, and run a complete surface scan on the disk. Ad if there is a Bios battery, check and replace.
Once you have a reasonably high certainty of good HARDWARE, add software.
And don't forget the MVPS HOSTS file, which short-circuits a great many tracking cookies by redirecting name resolution for the host sites (e.g. doubleclick) to the loopback adapter (127.0.0.1). As a result, where the adverts themselves are served by these tracking sites, they won't be displayed on client commercial web sites, so there will be empty space where they would otherwise be displayed.
Hmm. I refuse to allow the PC's inner workings to become a hobby. I've seen what it does to people :-)
The Spybot S&D does fine for me, i've added a few for specific sites since, but these probably aren't mecessary anymore if you use AdBlockPlus in Firefox.
You could try linux ;( Then you would not need to worry about all the Malware spyware and viruses that some seem to think you need to remove.
This will run as a live CD on just about any old PC.
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