poorly pc

sparrer

PLEASE can anyone help me before dementia sets in! My pc is 3 years old and used daily for general stuff such as email, storing photos, searching etc etc., definitely nothing techie. Recently it's taking upwards of 12 mins to start up, and often when opening a page the notice 'this page cannot be displayedl will show, then page after page will open in quick succession with the same message. The only way I can stop it is to turn it off at the tower. At other times it can take 1 - 2 minutes to open a page and a couple of times it's closed itself down completely.

It's defragged at least twice a week, ccleaner run several times a day, AVG anti-virus run daily, anti-spyware weekly. A techie has serviced the pc 2 years running but I'm not really in a position to have it done just now and am concerned that a, if I don't the pc will die on me or b, it's on its last legs and needs replacing anyway. In Nov he said it might last another 6 months but I wonder if that's because he wants to sell me a new one - my last one was good for 6 years.

Any help/advice/suggestions will be gratefully received. Many thanks in anticipation

albertross_2

how much ram has it got? If less than 512 MB, https://www.crucial.com/uk

what icons do you have near the clock?

Give it the once over with this

http://www.kaspersky.com/virusscanner

Do you ever backup?

Anything in start, run

eventvwr

?

which firewall do you use? Some of the IE errors could be isp related.


defragging does little on modern disks btw.

check the hard disk with

start, run, cmd
chkdsk c: /F
Y
reboot

sparrer

albertross wrote: »

how much ram has it got? If less than 512 MB, www.crucial.com/uk
*total 37.3gb, used 9.8gb (26%) would that be right?

what icons do you have near the clock?
*'safely remove hardware'
*volume
*Exif launcher 2
*AVG Free edition
*ATI
*EN

Give it the once over with this

http://www.kaspersky.com/virusscanner

Do you ever backup?
*leave that to the techie who does it at yearly service - last time was July 07

Anything in start, run

eventvwr
* application 1940 events
*security 1894 events
*system 1499 events
*ACEEventlog 334 events
*Internet Explorer 0 events

?

which firewall do you use? Some of the IE errors could be isp related.
*haven't a clue! But will find out


defragging does little on modern disks btw.
*I just did as I was told...

check the hard disk with

start, run, cmd
chkdsk c: /F
Y
reboot

*will now run Kaspersky, then do the chkdsk and reboot as you suggest.

Many thanks for your help :A

sparrer

Albertross it has Windows firewall. Kaspersky has only got to 1% so I'm going to leave it running and catch up with it in the morning. Thanks again for your reply.

Amalea

Only windows firewall? Please go and get something like Zone Alarm (free one's fine) as windows firewall isn't really enough to protect your PC...

culpepper

ram is the memory.if you click 'start',then 'control panel' then 'system', a little box will open which will tell you what operating system it is,etc and right at the bottom,how fast it runs and what amount of ram is installed.

ormus

run spybot and adaware as a first step.
also a hijackthis (prog) log, will show any problems.

sparrer

Thanks for that Amalea, I'll look into it. I've always trusted my techie to see to that sort of thing - he even has his own small drawer in my comp room with discs etc in it which I leave well alone. Unfortunately now he's too expensive and I've not heard of anyone else in the area who's reliable yet.

sparrer

culpepper wrote: »

ram is the memory.if you click 'start',then 'control panel' then 'system', a little box will open which will tell you what operating system it is,etc and right at the bottom,how fast it runs and what amount of ram is installed.

Culpepper is this what I'm looking for -

Computer
AMD Athlon(tm)MP
900MHz 256MB of RAM

ormus

presume it is a laptop? (seems a bit slow and not much memory).

sparrer

ormus wrote: »

presume it is a laptop? (seems a bit slow and not much memory).

Ormus it's a pc. Don't know much about computers but I do know I wouldn't want the big, bulky thing that's on the desk taking up space and gathering dust sitting on my lap :rotfl: