mrsnifflez

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Lately my internet explorer has been freezing up and not responding after clicking links. 90% of the time it is when I try to click a link that is sent in an email, but it also happens when I click links on websites. I have scanned for spyware, and ran my virus protection, and it came up empty. I don't know what in the world is going on, but if you know what's up, that'd be great. thx.

ET1(SS)

Are your running a firewall?

mrsnifflez

no, no firewall running. it is really getting on my nerves though.

ET1(SS)

Get behind a firewall. [the BEST firewall is the kind built into a router, they do not take system resources to run, they are independant]

Run your Virus shield all the time. [I use McAfee, one annual fee and it is updated daily, it scans my entire network one a day, so even my wife's and children's computers are kept clean].

Check what 'services' you have running, there MUST be some other thing running that is taking all your system resources. If you dont already have a hard-copy list of what 'services' are needed for your system to run go to the www.theeldergeek.com they have a listing of EVERY possible service that exists. Shut down and disable every service that you do not need to have running.

Then run RegCleaner, and / or RegSeeker, to examine every entry in your registry-hive to clean it out.

This could be: residue left over from something you installed then deleted, or who knows what.

Good Luck. Let us know what you find.

wolf68k

Have you run ScanDisk and DiskDefrag?
When you say you did a spyware scan, what program(s) did you use?

mrsnifflez

Thanks for the advice, i will i will try to do what you suggested ET1 if i can figure out exactly how to do this shit.....and to answer you wolf, i started to defrag, but during the analyzing stage, it said i didn't need to defrag?? and i used ad-aware to scan for spyware.

ET1(SS)

Ad-Aware is good, the more recent version the better.

Windoz looks at the percentage of de-fragmentation to determine if 'it' thinks your hard-drive is fragmented too badly.

Commonly systems will have many 'housekeeping' functions turned on also. Meaning that any time 'it' thinks that it is bored, it will automatically start doing stuff. Un-Fortunately that means that 'it' decides to begin defragging while you are trying to send e-mail, or something. Bah Micro-Soft sux.

Turn-off all 'housekeeping' types of functions, and use you task scheduler. Schedule all those tasks for when you are asleep in bed.

Commonly some systems will begin defragging it's file-paging, and it sounds like a garbage disposal running. Bull-Sht!!.

Turn all that crap off, and assign exactly what size paging you want. So long as you re-boot once a day, the paging will never get terribly fragmented.

As to your hard-drive and it's fragmentation, dont beleive what windoz says it thinks that it wants. De-frag anyway, on you way off to bed.

:-)

davemo2us

Hold up man. If you have never messed with your registry now is not the time to play with it. What OS are you using? How memory do you have? If you are using 2k or xp pull up task manager and see how your resources are holding up also look at this when you are trying to open IE and see what it says. You may even just try resetting your web settings in cause you had spyware, but got ride of it. And I second the adaware and spybot search and destroy use.

ET1(SS)

I do commonly tweak around wihtin my registry-hive.

I would not recommend it until you have read a lot at TheElderGeek.

But on the other hand:
1. De-Fragging never hurts, jsut dont let Windoz do it when 'It' wants to, otherwise you will never have the use of your system.
2. assuming that your running NT, or XP, then shutting down all un-needed 'services' is an absolute must. Why run-up all resources when you dont have to?
3. Run a strong virus scan always. Dos it really need an argument?
4. Running RegClean, and RegSeeker are both tried and true, tested and proven, everyone loves them, and they usually dont hurt anything, but of course the stuff that hogs resources.

Absolutely you should not tweak inside your registry unless you have read about it, and you feel comfortable about what your doing. Fortunately for most things you really dont need to stick your hands inside, just use the proven automated cleaners, and 'risk' to your system is really very small.

Davemo is right, I would never mean to advise anyone to play with registry settings, until later. For now just clean it up a bit, man.

:-)

mrsnifflez

I have a ton of things running on my task manager, but how do i know which ones to end and which to leave?? i am assuming this is what you are referring to?

ET1(SS)

Theeldergeek has a full listing. tried and proven.

First time through:
Control Panel, Admin, services. Then chose one thing, one service and turn it off, select 'disabled'. Ok, ok, and re-boot.

Assuming that nothing bad happened, go back in and chose another one.

Any service that you dont understand, Theeldergeek gives a full description of, and finally his opinion of. And if anyone has a complaint about the guy's opinion, they even give room for different opinions. [afterall nobody is perfect].

Personaly I would not disable anything until You KNOW that it is not needed, and verify that with the geek.

But again the guy who earlier said that you should not mess with the registry is right. At this point you dont need to touch that thing. Just running a few registry cleaners will likely help, but dont touch inside the hive, unless you have really read a lot about it.

Good luck.

mrsnifflez

eh, after running avg virus scan, it found a trojan horse, and apparently it is in a hidden file. i cannot find the file at all on my computer to delete it, as the free edition of avg will not dispose of infected files for you....you gotta pay for that which i think is quite , but go figure. but since this is a hidden file, i think i have decided to just scrap it and do a full recovery......i hate to resort to that, b/c this is a fairly new notebook....i just got it around christmas, but i don't have a clue as to how to get this damned virus off, and this seems to be the easiest way for me to fix everything back to normal. i won't do this until the weekend when i have more time, so until then if you have any other suggestions they will be considered as well. thanks for all of your help though.

ET1(SS)

I do recognize that the situation sux.

I went without solid virus protection for years. And I had to re-format numerous hard-drives during that time period.

I once decided to run a virus-shield on my system. But in the weeks to follow, it did bother me that I was using a portion of the system resources to do this. So I would shut it off, from time to time, when it seemed that my system was slowing down. As it turned out, every other time that I shut-off the virus-shield I got one. Sometimes I could clean it, sometimes I had to re-format.

After doing this many times, I hve finally came to the conclusion, that $30/year and runnng a virus-shield 100% of the time IS worth it.

:-)

davemo2us

Mrsnifflez, are you a student? Many schools offer free Anti virus software to students, I know we do. We figured it was cheaper than screwing with a virus over load.