Cry for techie help
Nov. 29th, 2004 02:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deviSo here I am, on a Monday morning, having been roped in to cure the Headmaster's computer, which seems very ill indeed. Alarmingly, I'm the most technical person in the whole GCSE department. And not having worked in IT for four years now (and even then it was often Linux boxes I worked on rather than PCs) I feel quite clueless.
Is anyone bored out there? Do you fancy casting your eyes over the list of symptoms and seeing what you think? There'll be pints in it for helpful people. (Or any professional proofing/editing you should need. Or a piece of calligraphy. Or whatever)
It's a Dell Dimension 2350 running Windows XP. It has 128 megs of RAM.
Firstly, it has slowed down from merely lazy to glacial in the course of the last week. It takes three or four minutes for icons to appear on the desktop.
Symantec LiveUpdate is blocked from downloading new updates, and suggests a virus may be causing any strange behaviour in application programs. It says to reinstall Norton, which is the first thing I'm going to try.
MSN (*spit*) won't let me refuse to sign in or close the sign-in window, or even minimise it.
IE: Many sites (eg Gmail) are refusing to accept sign-ins. My webmail page won't appear at all. Livejournal is OK, but it's in a minority. The address bar is acting oddly, refusing to accept any input till IE's been running for a few minutes.
No Works Word Processor files can be opened at all - "necessary files have been renamed, deleted or moved. Reinstall Works and restart." Headmaster claims he hasn't deleted or renamed anything (though he could be wrong).
I've scanned for spyware using Spybot, found four pieces of spyware and deleted them, which hasn't helped.
And oddest of all, the main Windows directory is full of folders, highlighted in blue, about 40 of the things, all called something like "$NtUninstallKB810217$" and containing a variety of bits and pieces, but most of them contain another folder called "spuninst". Again, he claims he hasn't uninstalled anything.
Do you know of a virus that behaves like this? Or could something else have gone wrong?
I'm tempted to just do a complete reinstall (because it's always been flaky), and put a firewall on it first thing I do. Headmaster would allow this in theory, though he says he wants to save some files first, but worries that if he mails them to another computer he'll infect that one too.
Any suggestions appreciated.
Edit: With the freaky shit. It's running Service Pack 1, I've increased the virtual memory and there was lots of free space on the disk. I've also persuaded the Head to buy some more memory, goddamnit. But I've just discovered, in the course of trying to burn a CD to save some of the files -
THIS MACHINE DOES NOT CUT AND PASTE.
IT DOES NOT DRAG AND DROP.
Nothing. Not text in Word, not files in My Computer. I've never seen anything like it.
Oh, and it says Windows Installer is not present, so I can't uninstall or reinstall anything at the moment. I presume there's a nice heavy-duty way of doing format c:// without going through Windows Installer? Oh please let there be.
Is anyone bored out there? Do you fancy casting your eyes over the list of symptoms and seeing what you think? There'll be pints in it for helpful people. (Or any professional proofing/editing you should need. Or a piece of calligraphy. Or whatever)
It's a Dell Dimension 2350 running Windows XP. It has 128 megs of RAM.
Firstly, it has slowed down from merely lazy to glacial in the course of the last week. It takes three or four minutes for icons to appear on the desktop.
Symantec LiveUpdate is blocked from downloading new updates, and suggests a virus may be causing any strange behaviour in application programs. It says to reinstall Norton, which is the first thing I'm going to try.
MSN (*spit*) won't let me refuse to sign in or close the sign-in window, or even minimise it.
IE: Many sites (eg Gmail) are refusing to accept sign-ins. My webmail page won't appear at all. Livejournal is OK, but it's in a minority. The address bar is acting oddly, refusing to accept any input till IE's been running for a few minutes.
No Works Word Processor files can be opened at all - "necessary files have been renamed, deleted or moved. Reinstall Works and restart." Headmaster claims he hasn't deleted or renamed anything (though he could be wrong).
I've scanned for spyware using Spybot, found four pieces of spyware and deleted them, which hasn't helped.
And oddest of all, the main Windows directory is full of folders, highlighted in blue, about 40 of the things, all called something like "$NtUninstallKB810217$" and containing a variety of bits and pieces, but most of them contain another folder called "spuninst". Again, he claims he hasn't uninstalled anything.
Do you know of a virus that behaves like this? Or could something else have gone wrong?
I'm tempted to just do a complete reinstall (because it's always been flaky), and put a firewall on it first thing I do. Headmaster would allow this in theory, though he says he wants to save some files first, but worries that if he mails them to another computer he'll infect that one too.
Any suggestions appreciated.
Edit: With the freaky shit. It's running Service Pack 1, I've increased the virtual memory and there was lots of free space on the disk. I've also persuaded the Head to buy some more memory, goddamnit. But I've just discovered, in the course of trying to burn a CD to save some of the files -
THIS MACHINE DOES NOT CUT AND PASTE.
IT DOES NOT DRAG AND DROP.
Nothing. Not text in Word, not files in My Computer. I've never seen anything like it.
Oh, and it says Windows Installer is not present, so I can't uninstall or reinstall anything at the moment. I presume there's a nice heavy-duty way of doing format c:// without going through Windows Installer? Oh please let there be.
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no subject
Date: 2004-11-29 05:16 am (UTC)THe first is Spyware. You partially ruled that out by running SpyBot, but try running AdAware too just to be sure. Make sure you tell it to update its database.
The second has to do with the "uninstall" folders. As others point out, they're generated by Windows Update, which installs hotfixes (by the way, the blue means they're compressed folders). If it's set to install updates in without warning, it's partly good because it means the machine will be fairly up to date, but it also means it could have installed SP2. This could cause a couple of problems. First, check if it's been installed by opening Windows Explorer and looking under Help->About.
First of all, as it's rather huge, it could be taking up a lot of hard disk space, causing the swap file to be too small. First thing, check there's plenty of free disk space. Second, go to the System control panel, and go to the Advanced tab. Click on performance settings, and change the virtual memory settings. I would suggest for a system with 128MB to set the minimum size to 512MB and the Maximum to 1024MB. But as mentioned above, 128MB really isn't very much for an XP system - suggest an upgrade to at least 256MB would be a worthwhile investment.
The other problem SP2 can cause is that it installs its own firewall. Presumably you have a network firewall, so this is rather redundant, and it can block things you don't want it to in its default configuration. It could be that it's blocking HTTPS, which could be stopping you getting into things you ought to be able to.
SP2's improved security also causes conflicts with quite a number of applications, including quite a few Microsoft ones. Many software vendors have fixes on their websites, but you tend to have to it on an application by application basis.
Of course, it could be nothing to do with any of this. Reinstalling the virus checker is a good start. Reinstalling the OS might help, but you could find by the time you installed and patched (or it patched itself) that you'd be back where you started.