Posts by GadgetTofu

first, in response to jhay. yes i have run ccleaner. (a friend recommended it to me, and I like it a lot.) Second in response to nizzy's "I don't think he's infected"...
I'm a girl hehe. And also you are correct that formatting should be a last resort, however..this computer is around 6 years old and its never been formatted. Its been running buggy for quite some time now even before all of this. I would love to do a clean install. I think it would be a good idea, not only to fix my current issue, but others as well. I have spent a lot of time fixing problems and trying to make things run right and its been very tiresome. So alas, I think I am going to go ahead and format. I've already backed up all the neccesary files and programs, and will most likely be doing it tommorow. Wish me luck! Once I'm done and connected to the internet again, I'll come back and post to let you all know how it goes. Thank you all for your advice and help, it is much appreciated. :)

I am considering formatting for the first time. This computer is about 5-6 years old and its never been done.

I didnt just run Norton though. I also ran Housecall Online, Stinger, Panda Active Scan Online, as well as Spybot search and destroy and Ad-Aware. No viruses were found. And any adware stuff I found, I got rid of. I know better than to just trust Norton by itself. I am certain I have no viruses

I started the computer in diagnostic mode, however I'm not able to check and see if the audio works because in diagnostic mode it says "no sound device detected on system". So in diagnostic mode I'm assuming the driver does not load. I don't know why all of a sudden the sound would start acting this way after restart. I don't know if I should update my sound driver or not and if so, I don't know where to look. I was unable to find any updates higher than the version i have now. I have tried playing the video files/mp3's on several different programs, so its not just Nero that does it. As far as the processes running, I've checked all the ones running and they are all neccesary to running Norton and Windows. They were all running before the problem started as well. I don't know what could be running to make the sound be doing this. I'm at a loss. The last thing I want to do is reinstall windows. Its a real pain. Any other suggestions?

I went and rank chkdsk like suggested but that didnt help. the main problem I seem to be having now is with my audio. I considered that maybe I need to update my driver, but again..this wasn't happening before shutdown. My audio was fine. I will start the computer in diagnostic mode like suggested and see if it does it then. I can't play videos because the audio is choppy and skips. Its not just with video files, also happens with mp3's and other computer wav files.

Audio (just in case your curious)

VIA AC'97 Audio Controller (WDM)
VIA Technoligies, Inc.
Driver Version: 5.1.2535.0

I also read that SP2 and VIA AC'97 do not work well together. Some people reinstalled windows and didn't install SP2 and it fixed it. So I uninstalled SP2 and that didn't help.

Hello everyone. I am in need of serious help. Usually I am always able to eliminate and narrow down the possibilities of a problem, and therefore fix it. But this time I'm at a loss.
My computer was running fine and then one day I shut it down (which is rare for me..I know..thats bad.) But anywho, I came back later that day started it up and thats when the trouble started. The computer would sit on the windows loading screen for over a minute, then it would eventually load. Now I seem to have high cpu usage and its very laggy. You can even tell thats its lagging just by moving the mouse around in circles you can see it almost "stick".

I have done the obvious. I have run the following programs:

Norton antivirus
Stinger
Housecall Online
Panda Active Scan Online
Ad-Aware
Spybot Search and Destroy

I found no viruses and a few spyware things I got rid of.
I also defragmented and ran SFC /Scannow

I tried to think of programs I may have just installed that may be conflicting with windows and uninstalled anything that I thought was recent.

I can also tell the computer is running laggy because when I am running absolutely no programs and go to watch an avi file on my computer, the audio skips (and sometimes video) which it wasn't doing before. I use to watch movies even when …