Be Excellent To Each Other

Parents eh? You beam proudly - all smiles - as they buy a new computer and then before long, once again, they've got a heap of junk on their hands. How do they do it, eh? How do they reduce any normal computer that putters along happily under the tender loving care of a Beexer to a stuttering, whirring, achingly slow rust-bucket? Just what is it with older relatives and their inability to maintain a computer?

Home for the Bank Holidays and am using the 'rents compy. However, it takes ages to load with at least a four minute wait until Internet Explorer loads up without crashing. Then the hard drive constantly clucks and rattles along to itself making itself sound as if its doing very important things without actually being told to do anything. Worst of all, periodically the computer fan starts up with an ghastly jet-engine like whirring roar for no reason at all... there it goes again! WTF? I've only got Google Chrome open... argh.

I've just installed Spybot and let it loose, and am going to poke about with CCleaner. Can anyone recommend any programs to get to the bottom of why this computer is such a lumbering, noisy mess? It's a pentium 4 3.06ghz 1 gig of RAM machine with Windows XP service pack 3 but surely that's enough for simple internet browsing and music and so on? Any thoughts? Help me Beex, you're my only hope - I can't play Minecraft or Defcon on this, it's intolerable!

Run msconfig, and have a look in the startup tab. Untick stuff that really doesn't need to be running.

I had to nuke XP and start again. It would sit there rattling the disk forever, and the task bar never appeared! No viruses on it, it was just totally parented up.
Same spec machine too.

I've run CCleaner now and fixed registry errors - about 100 of them - and installed Spybot and ran that. It found 29 Trojan/spybot applications, three of which I figured as a major concern, and fixed them too. It seems to have stopped its immensely loud whirring now. For how long I don't know. Hope I don't have to do what you did and nuke the site from orbit, Kalmar.

Craster, checked MSCONFIG start-up. It all seemed to be in order. About 18 entries on startup, non looking dodgy.

Do all 18 need to be starting up with the PC though?

Saying that.. I've just checked and I've got 14.

If you love them, buy them a Mac.

I reluctantly "support" my brother's computer in a similar manner. He seems to collect trojans like a dog collects fleas.

Pete, if you're going to be supporting your parents computer on a regular basis, the best thing is to do what I did - go pinch Acronis, or a similar image software program. Then reinstall windows, and set it up as they like it, and then mirror image the whole lot onto a spare partition.

I used to spend hours slowly fixing up my brothers pc - now I just boot it into Acronis, and re-image the hard-drive, and in less than 5 mins he's got a totally clean fresh install ready for him to get infected all over again.

Yeah, but how many of those 18 are actually necessary?

Still, getting rid of 29 infections should probably make something of a difference.

Even once you get it running again, 1gig of RAM isn't very much. Doubling that would help and probably cost about 30p for an obsolete stick from eBay. Also, how old is the hard drive?

Not sure how old the hard drive is, but I think the computer as a whole is at least five years old. Kal, like your idea of mirroring an image onto a partition, but might be a bit too fiddly for me to explain to my PC-paranoid parents. The extra ram stick is an idea though. Maybe I'll get it them for Christmas.

Computer's working a bit better now, looks like the spring-cleaning I did last night made some difference. The fan has stopped roaring for one.

Another curious thing is that under 'My Computer' they have four USB removable disc storage devices listed, (F, G, H & I) but none actually plugged in. What do you make of that?

Thanks for the replies thus far!

Have they got a multi-format memory card reader plugged/built in?

Or a printer with card slots too.

No multiformat card reader, but they do have a printer. HP Deskjet F380. Can't see any slots on it though.

Wonder if they've been pulling out USB sticks without Safely Removing first. Could that lead to wackiness?

My PC does that but that's because it has a memory card reader in one of the expansion slots. When you double click on one, it'll simply ask you to insert a memory card.

I don't think taking out memory sticks without safely removing them will cause that much of a problem, especially if there's only files like pictures etc on them.

I can only speak for myself, but I've never used that option to safely remove any USB device and I've never had a problem - I just yank 'em out.

Not sure what else those drives could be though - unless there's some kind of cover on the front of the PC hiding card slots?

Hmm, bafflement then! Not a big problem as far as I can see. And my tinkering has definitely removed the whirring, so phew. I think more ram is needed though, as it does have a tendency to chug sometimes. There is a cover hiding the USB slots but no sticks in them, nor are there cards in slots.

Self-satisfyingly gave my parents a stern lecture in virus and spybot protection.

My parents one has a load of card slots behind a slide-open door on the front panel. Those are the cause of E,F,G,H drives being listed all the time on that machine, even with no cards inserted.

Consider pre-emptively replacing the hard drive soon before it goes tits up, because I bet they have no backup strategy. In my (admittedly conservative) opinion consumer hard drives that have seen regular use for more than three or so years should be treated with caution. This doesn't have to be expensive or hard - £30 on a small replacement drive and a couple of hours while a cloner program churns away would do the trick. Much less painful than the tech support call if it dies altogether.

You should have done that when they bought it

Look in the device manager under disk drives. It'll list the drives as as SD, cf or whatever.

Failing that, right click on my computer, manage, disk management and they'll be listed there

Why are you asking him to graffiti up your computer and how will it help him with his parents' computer?

Malc

There's a reason that parents' computers inevitably get screwed up. That reason can be summed up with just two words. Two words that were uttered to me, by my Dad, after I showed him how to use Google on his new iPad.

"Dirty women?"

My parents are incredibly brilliant with computers, it's my sister's computers that end up dog slow and full of viruses.

My sister doesn't even /have/ a computer, and where she lives there is neither ADSL nor a phone signal.
I have to send her lolcats by post.

Fuck all this shit, have you done the most important thing? Run a benchmark test to see what numbers show up then ordered 15 different graphics cards?

Good lord, no I haven't Dimrill! Tell me, what's best for Microsoft Word? I'm a bit concerned about insufficient pipelines being unable to give me an adequate text-to-type response. I've noted a lag of 0.003 seconds between each key press and character appearing.

This caused me further problems. My dad understands the anti-virus program just fine. His girlfriend thinks she does, and so helpfully applies the anti-virus updates when it asks.

You know, the anti-virus updates you get on webpages that tell you that you might be at risk of infection and download this now POPUPTROJANLOL.

On the opposite end of the scale, yet right next to the bad side, my mum's partner is so obsessed with keeping his computer clean and running smoothly that he's installed a host of software for that very task. So many different virus scanners, spyware scanners, defrag tools and registry cleaners sit side by side that the system absolutely crawls everywhere, and his time on the computer is spent almost entirely trying to maintain it.

Utter fucking nutter.

My dad is really good with his PC. Even though he's still tried to kill it several times in his paranoid attempts to keep viruses and spyware at bay.

He's got host files installed and all kinds of things. He spends most of his days researching the latest anti-spyware and virus software and whatnot it would seem. He checks every new site out with WOT and site advisor before going there.

He goes to great lengths to stop things like the Google Cookie which I see as relatively harmless, and anything like stat counting things on websites.

He uses things like CCleaner quite often and is obsessed with removing anything he thinks might be slightly superfluous. Which again has caused problems in the past. But at least his computer is secure. So much so even he can't use it..

Meh; just turn them all off. When something actually complains/isn't available, turn that single thing back on.

Install Avast, select "run boot time scan on reboot". Watch it devour.

Install MBAM (Malware Bytes Anti Malware) and run that. Watch it devour.

And you should be pretty clean.

We've seen a few virus at work that are highly resistant to AV. They seem to be wiping the MBR and installing their own custom version. The virus manifests as like a DNS hijacker, but with no obvious footprints. Nothing too scary yet (can't go to Microsoft websites or windows update) but we're having to wipe and reimage the machines to get rid.

Of course, Sophos is utterly useless, but the IT manager insists on sticking with it.

It'll be TDL3 , which is a rootkit and a complete pain to get rid of , but there are mechanisms.

I'd suggest you try asking for some help from your AV company.

Aye, I think I will.

Luckily, both my parents are dead so I don't have these problems.

Unfortunately, neither my sister-in-law nor daughter are dead, so I have to deal with their IT related problems instead.

My Sister-in-common-law's laptop has been playing up recently, it's a Dell inspiron running Vista (shudders) and it lost internet access (was connected to the wifi, but only locally), then it would boot up to the password screen, but after then just load a black screen, booting to safe mode was the same, but with the words safe mode in the 4 corners as is it's want. At this point you could press ctrl-alt-del and get that screen up, but nothing else worked (no keyboard shortcuts) nothing else would work and she had to soft power it off.

So I talked her through (all over the phone) changing the boot sequence and booting from her os disk (which appears not to be bootable) to no avail, so she said she had a friend who might look at it and we hung up, then she phoned back 10 minutes later, she'd tried one more reboot and it all just worked!

Moist odd

Malc

On parent's computer again. Updated Spybot and ran an 'immunize' and now Google Chrome won't load, and it seems to have a beef with the Google sign in the Firefox browser when I try to get into Gmail, crashing the browser. Any thoughts?

Pondering uninstalling Spybot to see if it fixes it, as the Recovery option doesn't list anything. Grrr.