I am totally confused...I am going to buy a separate hard drive as discussed with Chris and Mike to load my son's games onto..but other than that I have no idea what an earth happened.

Sorry about your computer. They can be the most aggravating instruments known to man. Are we talking of a slave drive or a RAID Controller? Either one is a good idea. It'll take some pressure off the primary drive.

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Account frozen...

Sitting down in the Cafe with a doughnut, large mug of black coffee, several newspapers and a large advertising book. The latter to look for a new hard drives.

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It's good to be back amongst friends and colleagues

Good MorningAfternoonNight!...Still waiting for the rain to come in this vicinity.

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PROUD TO BE TFFE!

I am totally confused...I am going to buy a separate hard drive as discussed with Chris and Mike to load my son's games onto..but other than that I have no idea what an earth happened.

Sorry about your computer. They can be the most aggravating instruments known to man. Are we talking of a slave drive or a RAID Controller? Either one is a good idea. It'll take some pressure off the primary drive.

I believe she is thinking about an external USB drive. Anyway her PC is running XP which has its own inbuilt firewall, so I don't understand why Zonealarm is running at all? In addition Windows will always throw a wobbly when the disc is over 90% full, its an inbuilt factor to safeguard enough space for temporary OS files.

Well that is my problem then.. I really need to clean out my hard drive...starting with all those Star Wars and Warhammer games.

I was thinking about an external USB harddrive. I can probably pick one up fairly cheap at the computer fair I go to in Croydon sometimes.

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Reality Internet Personality

Well that is my problem then.. I really need to clean out my hard drive...starting with all those Star Wars and Warhammer games.

I was thinking about an external USB harddrive. I can probably pick one up fairly cheap at the computer fair I go to in Croydon sometimes.

Hi Esme

The other point is that you shouldn't have two firewalls running on one machine, as they can interact with each other and cause problems. If you really want to run a third party one, such as Zonealarm or Norton Internet Security etc, you need to disable the Windows one. Also try Ccleaner to get rid of all the crap on the PC, it's free and has always worked well on my machines.

http://www.ccleaner.com/

I have the windows firewall turned off....I'll take a look at PC cleaner though.

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Reality Internet Personality

Well that is my problem then.. I really need to clean out my hard drive...starting with all those Star Wars and Warhammer games.

I was thinking about an external USB harddrive. I can probably pick one up fairly cheap at the computer fair I go to in Croydon sometimes.

Hi Esme

The other point is that you shouldn't have two firewalls running on one machine, as they can interact with each other and cause problems. If you really want to run a third party one, such as Zonealarm or Norton Internet Security etc, you need to disable the Windows one. Also try Ccleaner to get rid of all the crap on the PC, it's free and has always worked well on my machines.

http://www.ccleaner.com/

I have the windows firewall turned off....I'll take a look at PC cleaner though.

CCleaner works well for me...You'll probably get rid of a couple gigs of crap just by using that.

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PROUD TO BE TFFE!

Well that is my problem then.. I really need to clean out my hard drive...starting with all those Star Wars and Warhammer games.

I was thinking about an external USB harddrive. I can probably pick one up fairly cheap at the computer fair I go to in Croydon sometimes.

Hi Esme

The other point is that you shouldn't have two firewalls running on one machine, as they can interact with each other and cause problems. If you really want to run a third party one, such as Zonealarm or Norton Internet Security etc, you need to disable the Windows one. Also try Ccleaner to get rid of all the crap on the PC, it's free and has always worked well on my machines.

http://www.ccleaner.com/

I have the windows firewall turned off....I'll take a look at PC cleaner though.

CCleaner works well for me...You'll probably get rid of a couple gigs of crap just by using that.

If I can get my computer to work again. It's totally frozen up again and won't reboot properly. As soon as I can I am going to strip those bloody games out.

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Reality Internet Personality

Well that is my problem then.. I really need to clean out my hard drive...starting with all those Star Wars and Warhammer games.

I was thinking about an external USB harddrive. I can probably pick one up fairly cheap at the computer fair I go to in Croydon sometimes.

Hi Esme

The other point is that you shouldn't have two firewalls running on one machine, as they can interact with each other and cause problems. If you really want to run a third party one, such as Zonealarm or Norton Internet Security etc, you need to disable the Windows one. Also try Ccleaner to get rid of all the crap on the PC, it's free and has always worked well on my machines.

http://www.ccleaner.com/

I have the windows firewall turned off....I'll take a look at PC cleaner though.

CCleaner works well for me...You'll probably get rid of a couple gigs of crap just by using that.

If I can get my computer to work again. It's totally frozen up again and won't reboot properly. As soon as I can I am going to strip those bloody games out.

My brother just gave me an old computer...It was freezing up every 5 minutes...So i blew the dust out of it...and it froze up only once in 2 hours...Then on a hunch i disabled the video card...And it's been going for 17 hours straight with no problems...So it could be one of a number of different problems causing your computer to freeze up...If overheating is a problem...carefully blowing the dust out with some canned air may help...or failing that...sucking the dust out with a vacuum.

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PROUD TO BE TFFE!

When they run all the time like ours it is bast to clean the heat sink at least twice a year. That helps solve a lot of problems.

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Pizza@Home Rays Place Rays place Forums

I'll certainly try all these things..but I suspect the fact that the hard drive is 90% full has a lot to do with it.

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Reality Internet Personality

Esme

Not only is it worth while cleaning at all games, which will leave their registry entries untouched, but it is also useful to DeFrag the drive. Not only will the games be clear about, but the defragmentation will organise the files to allow more rapid access. This may well help speed up your computer, but after the excess crap is removed.

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It's good to be back amongst friends and colleagues

Also try Ccleaner to get rid of all the crap on the PC, it's free and has always worked well on my machines.

p.s. I check ALL the settings when I run it

The installer also installs Yahoo toolbar by default - you have to remember to uncheck a box to avoid that. I forgot the first time I installed the latest version in response to your post, and avast! antivirus reported a trojan horse during the installation. I deinstalled and installed again without the Yahoo rubbish, and there were no more problem with trojans.

Edit - but I've just checked and it did not de-install the toolbar, so I will have to hope that avast! did its job properly. Heigh-ho, now lots of fun trying to get rid of Yahoo's spyware. Fortunately I don't have to use Internet Explorer any more anyway.

Edit2 - the Yahoo deinstaller attempts to initiate internet traffic, for which I see no excuse whatsoever. It also wants me to restart the machine to deinstall something I didn't want in the first place and which installed happily enough without a restart. Grrrr.

Edit3 - the program itself works nicely though - it has just removed about 4GB of rubbish in 15 seconds.

I'll certainly try all these things..but I suspect the fact that the hard drive is 90% full has a lot to do with it.

Not really.
A fully HD has nothing to do with freezes.
I expect a dll conflict.

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With each crime and every kindness we birth our future.

Hi Esme! ::waves::

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me@rescam.org

A few thoughts.

Firstly, you should not have more than one firewall enabled, that will cause problems.

Zonealarm has a major memory leak problem. It doesn't show up on "normal use" machines but can slow a "24/7" machine to the point where the mouse pointer takes 5 minutes or more to respond to movement of the mouse.

Zonealarm have been notified of this problem by myself and many others but they have refused to admit to the problem. Solution, use another firewall.

Don't want to cause you stress but, after getting rid of zonealarm, the most common cause of speed reduction I have found is spyware, trojans etc.

I tried various anti-spyware programs and they all reported "no problems".

At the suggestion of a friend I installed AVG anti-spyware and it found and removed over 20 nasties. Problem solved. Happy camper. :D

Hope this helps.

Zonealarm has a major memory leak problem. It doesn't show up on "normal use" machines but can slow a "24/7" machine to the point where the mouse pointer takes 5 minutes or more to respond to movement of the mouse.

Zonealarm have been notified of this problem by myself and many others but they have refused to admit to the problem. Solution, use another firewall.

Zonealarm is terrible. It kept giving alerts that my own IP address was attacking me. So I uninstalled it.

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Wow..thanks for all the advice..it's clearly going to take a while to try everything out..I'm a bit overworked at the moment, but I need to get it sorted soon because I have been given some work sorting out the local Teacher's Union Website and I need to start on that...but it's hard with my computer behaving the way it is. I'll keep you all informed. :-)


oh..and Hi Chris!! ::Waves back::

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Reality Internet Personality

Esme

You may wish to consider looking at, and using, the antivirus/anti trojan/anti pilshing/etc the 30 day free trial system I use - Eset Ltd NOD32. The URL can be found here.

The only active firewall I use across all my machines is the hardware firewall in my route. The rest of my security is provided by memory resident NOD 32. However, I do carry out daily antivirus, etc, sweeps using NOD 32, backed by weekly sweeps via Lavasoft, X. Block and other non-memory residence.

With the other advice you have this could get rid of uninvited software that is slowing down your system (remember the games, your boys have downloade). Couple this with the crap remover software and DeFrag many give you a fresh system altogether.

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It's good to be back amongst friends and colleagues

Morning guys and gals.

Well, yesterday I wound up having a hard drive fail. Its a 40g Western Digital, about 6 years old. :-( All I hear is it clicking. After doing some looking, sounds like the thing that reads the drive maybe stuck. What also sucks, is that all my mp3's and some other files were on that drive. :-( I'm gonna try a few suggestions that I found, and keep my fingers crossed, but I am kinda leaning towards that its not gonna work, and I'm SOL. :-(

Anyhow, back to work. Have a nice day all.

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Morning guys and gals.

Well, yesterday I wound up having a hard drive fail. Its a 40g Western Digital, about 6 years old. :-( All I hear is it clicking. After doing some looking, sounds like the thing that reads the drive maybe stuck. What also sucks, is that all my mp3's and some other files were on that drive. :-( I'm gonna try a few suggestions that I found, and keep my fingers crossed, but I am kinda leaning towards that its not gonna work, and I'm SOL. :-(

Anyhow, back to work. Have a nice day all.

I had that with a pc a few years ago. Thinking I had nothing to lose anyway I thumped the errant drive hard with a rubber hammer a couple of times, and rebooted it on its side, then upside down. It came back just long enough to get the data off! (Dont try this at home boys & girls!)

In the "old" days there were hard drive head parking programs, Wdpark? that occasionally would move a sticky disk, but they don't work on modern drives. Of course you make regular backups don't you? Yeah of course you do, as do we all.....

p.s. We ought to rename this Rocky's Technical Cafe!!!

LOL Well, I have been meaning to buy a new drive, to replace this one that died, as it WAS my backup drive. LOL Oh well. I'm hoping to be able to get it to come back to life. I tried tapping it, that didn't work, so I'm gonna try freezing it, as another website suggested. LOL Might be able to bring it to life just long enough to get my important stuff off of it.

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