I'm freezing on XP!

[Brian Baker]

Hey all. I'm new to this site. I hope there's someone on here that can help me out. My computer is freezing up on me and I don't know why. I'm running XP Pro. My CPU is 700 MHz Intel Celeron. My RAM is 320 MB. My video card is an NVIDIA GEForce 2 MX. My computer has worked fine for a long time now. This problem has only been happening for a couple of weeks. I've run Spybot. I've run my antivirus and did have 3 entries for a trojan called NCase. I think I've gotten rid of that. I read somewhere that I needed to disable system restore and then delete the files the virus was in for them to get deleted. So that's what I did and I haven't gotten any detection messages yet. So I'm keeping my fingers crossed. But I am still having trouble with the computer freezing up. I was able a little while ago to watch a music video in QuickTime format all the way through without it freezing, but then I tried to watch one that was used by Windows Media Player and the whole computer froze. The mouse wouldn't even work. This happens on all videos, DVD's, when I try to scan and save something, whenever my wife tries to open her Autocad projects for school, and sometimes when there are too many windows open at the same time too I think. So any ideas would be helpful. I have also tried running checkdisk, defrag, and deleting some programs and files on the hard drive to free up some space (by the way I have a 20GB hd). Please help me out. I'm about ready to reformat the hard drive. I really don't want to do that though if I don't have to. We all know how much work is involved by doing that (getting all the programs installed again that you like).
I appreciate any help you could offer.

Brian Baker

[industry2m]

NCase is Adware not a trojan (that's a good thing - sort of).

I know you said you ran you spyware removal programs but do the following. One of the biggest problems people make is running spyware or virus removal software in normal windows running mode. A lot of the times, some of the strong viruses / spyware cannot be stopped in this mode. Therefore you have to do it in safe mode.

- install the newest version of Ad Aware SE (make sure you do the updates)
- install spybot the newest version and run the updates
- update your antivirus defenition files
- don't scan yet
- restart your pc in SAFE MODE (press F8 when it's starting up and you'll get a menu)
- once you're in safe mode run adawre, then spybot, then antivirus.

Lastly check your startup log (START, RUN, MSCONFIG) and look for weird items that look unusal. How do you know it's weird, well just type in the name in google. For example, if you see "ncase.exe", write it down then go into normal windows mode with internet access. Go to google type that in and do some research on it. Then you can decide if that is a real windows task or spyware/virus.

Hope this is helpful :cheesy: