Thread dedicated to IT shite.

My questions are;

1) when I switch on my pc it takes about 5min at least to be ready to open internet explorer or any other application. Seems really slow. I have broadband, Service Pack 2, Norton and the microsoft anti-spyware beta thing installed and all is regularly updated and scanned. Any ideas as to how I can speed up the start up process?

2) Sometimes, and this has happend twice now (over about 6 months) norton will pop up and say; "Was-up Yo? we have detected a trojan Horse but cant remove it, cool?" So I say OK, as that is the only option it gives me. now this is a little concerning as a complete system scan with norton shows up nothing. So I update the spyware one and do a scan with that and it found something and removed it. Can anyone reccommend a good, free anti-trojan horse thingy?

Thanks.

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K.E.R.S!!!1

1) reinstall windows xp. basically u wont be able to delete all the shit that is slowing the whole computer down. this happens alot as time goes on.

2) avg free anti-virus. it picks up stuff that other virus scanners wont and its free! im guessing when norton said that it put it in quarantine.

With the slowness, you dont have any external devices plugged in while booting up do you? E.g I have a card reader and if I have my Compact Flash card in on bootup it takes 5+ minutes to boot, also having my external maxtor hard drive slows the boot up and shutdown down a minute or so. If not, and you are running xp/2000 just go to a run command and type in dfrg.msc and do a defrag of your machine, also uninstall any programs which you dont use regularly and just do a general tidy up.

As for Nortons not removing the trojan, that does not surprise me. I am not going to get into which Virus scanner is better as it it like comparing subaru's with mitsubishis, fords with holdens etc (p.s subarus & fords ) If you can get the exact virus name when norton comes up with it again, do a search on google for it as most times mcafee and CA release specialised scanners just to pick up that particular trojan. (Symantec make one of these special (free) scanners called Stinger, but as you are running a symantec product and it isnt picking up the virus, I doubt stinger will but its worth a shot.

Goodluck!!

thanks guys will give this a try.

Chee, the XP is a "borrowed one".

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K.E.R.S!!!1

I'd also suggest getting rid of the MS anti-spyware crapola... i tested it on dozens of machines a few months ago and found it to be more buggy and annoying than useful.

If you need anti-spyware, just run something like Ad-Aware (www.download.com) regularly.

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Julian
05 STi

It is Beta afterall dude, however I have not had a problem with it.

things like North Internet Security (or firewall) & Anti-Virus programs takes a lot of time to initialize. if you look at the small icons on the task bar (left hand side of the system clock) you should get a good picture of how many programs you have at the start up, the more you have the longer it takes for the system to be ready.

during the course of install & uninstall programs and other crap since your last reinstall of XP, alot of shit are left in ur registry and that could also slow ur PC down.

so, do a complete reinstall and take a image of it after you installed all the "necessary" programs & drivers, this should shorten much of your time in reinstalling the system next time.

un install norton, it is the biggest load of crap software around, probably worse than any virus you can get. piss it off and get AVG instead

try not to load those apps during startup, as it just slows the whole system down considerably too. just allow windows to start, then manually start ur antivirus, firewall, etc.

buy some more memory its cheap and that will solve everything and buy a antivirus software. and nortons is good if u got the memory!