OT. Dell

[Steve Firth]

You don't understand Unix? How bizarre.

[John Rumm]

Yup, I would second that. Norton has become practically unusable in recent years. It can bring even relatively high end machines to their knees. AVG seems to do a much more effective job for a fraction of the resources used.

[Derek Geldard]

A bit like CP/M or TRS80 speak isn't it ?

One or t' other.

DG

[Steve Firth]

You're using an OS built on a cheap clone of CP/M.

[Steve Firth]

AVG Still sucks cycles as does Zone Alarm. And running both together brings my wife's HP laptop to a standstill. I'm going to buy her a real computer this year.

[Andy Hall]

iMac?

[Steve Firth]

Probably, although I'll let her use this MBP for a time to see if she would prefer another laptop. The HP has been such a shoddy piece of work that I suspect she'll be glad to see the back of it.

[tony sayer]

And while your about it ditch the Adobe Reader and get Foxit reader ..much --lighter-- to run:)..

[tony sayer]

What do you mean by a real computer?, hasn't she already got one then?..

Mind you most everyone using an ADSL router has a pretty good firewall built into that with NAT translation inherent...

[Steve Firth]

Nah just some rubbish built by HP with an OS designed by the blind watchmaker.

[John Rumm]

There is no getting away from the fact that all the AV packages place a significant load on the machines these days - especially when they scan for non virus malware as well.

You could go for AVG internet security and ditch Zone Alarm. The AVG bundled firewall does not seem particularly resource heavy. (i.e. there is no real performance difference between the Internet Security Package and the Anti Malware one)

[Colin Wilson]

That's quite true, but in the meantime, i'd suggest ditching AVG (whose detection rate has always seemed poor in real-world experience to Avast), and do a general sweep of the system to make sure there's nothing untoward running on it.

For the OP...

First things first, press CTRL-SHIFT-ESC and see how many processes she has running - a "clean" system (new install) *with* Avast and ZoneAlarm generally has 33-34.

My heavily loaded system (over 18 months old, and has a _lot_ of apps installed) currently has 43 processes, but of these, two are my newsreader (one for the main app, one for this message), an email program, and a browser. Another task is the task manager which I still have open as I type now, so call it 42 :-p

Also, check the amount of memory in the machine - you want to look at the "commit charge" in the status bar of the task manager. Make sure she has at least as much physical memory in the machine as she is for the "commit charge" or it'll just page to disk permanently.

Has it been defragged lately ? - if not, I can recommend JKDefrag (google for it) - it's small, system friendly, and very efficient. There's no "interface" for it as such, you can simply close the window to stop it running (it'll finish the file it's working on first)

If she has significantly more processes, it's worth going to hijackthis.de and downloading HijackThis - run it with the "save to logfile" option, and copy and paste the results to the window on the same site to give yourself an idea what each thing might be as the machine boots. Take the results with a pinch of salt though, as it doesn't know every variation of every application in the world :-}

[Derek Geldard]

I was hardwired in them days.

DG

[John Stumbles]

Linux can read and write to all types of FAT, and read NTFS partitions (I'm not sure what the current status is on writing to NTFS). There are also some programs and drivers for accessing Linux's ext2/3 filesystems from NT family Windows (NT, XP, Vista)

[Colin Wilson]

Writing to NTFS seems to work fine now - i've done it a couple of times from Ubuntu 7.04 from a wubi install (a "virtual" partition that can be used to boot linux from a hard-file mounted under NTFS) to the same physical partition as the host OS, i.e. XP

[John Stumbles]

When I passed my shuttle on to my son he installed XP on it. I'd installed Ubuntu and two versions of Debian on it before and it had Just Worked (TM). He spent ages hunting around for drivers for this & that under XP. (The only reason he wants XP is to run itunes.)

[Colin Wilson]

Does he need the itunes store, or just the functionality to transfer to the ipod ?

You could always point him towards Amarok :-}

[Andy Champ]

No Steve, I don't. I can use some flavours of it - but not very well. This is true of half a dozen (1) other operating systems I've used. The only one I truly understood was the one I wrote myself, and that didn't do much. I understand Windows better because I've used it professionally for many years, and that is because I write software for a living and the biggest market for software is on Windows.

Andy

(1) Let's see... George III, VME/K, VME/B, OS/360, whatever it was on that odd Burroughs jobby, CP/M (inc CP/M86, MP/M, CDOS), MS-DOS-come-PC-DOS, Win 3.1, Win NT (totally different BTW), Solaris, Ubuntu... I lose count.

[Steve Firth]

That rather depends on the approach one takes. The biggest market for the software I wrote was Macintosh users. Sheeple may think they know better or be proud of mastering a barbaric and poorly implemented OS, but they're wrong.

[The Medway Handyman]

Help Rob! Call the TLA police!

I thought LAS was bad enough!