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Need some PC help...

E

Eleven

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 5, 2004
27
0
I feel awkward asking for help but you guys seem to be well informed...

The PC in question is a selfbuilt P4 running WinXP Home with the new SP2 upgrade (they've released it publically now). Anyways, when the start menu is clicked the whole comp seems to half freeze... basically the entire desktop is frozen, ditto with the startmenu, though a window or two and parts of the taskbar are functional. Its happened with SP1 and hasn't changed with the SP2 update.

They got a fully updated norton running, and my parents (its their comp), are very light computer users, internet, mail, a bit of kazaa (no games...).

I've never seen anything like this and was wondering if you guys had any ideas?

Its kinda ironic how all these problems happen a month after I get my mac, and week before I leave for school...

Thanks in advance.
 
I guess you have done a virus scan and found nothing, right? I would suggest Spybot and Ad-aware

These can sometimes pick up some stuff which makes your computer do funny things.

Hope this helps. :)
 
Before we start spouting off insults about PC's you might check to see what they have downloaded with Kazaa. As of 3 months ago, 45% of the executables on there were some type of virus. If this is an ongoing problem and has been doing this for awhile you might want to do a format and fresh install and leave kazaa out of your next upgrade. Random freezing in the same spots sounds like bad code or a glitch caused by 3rd party software, NOT XP!
 
Rabidjade said:
Before we start spouting off insults about PC's you might check to see what they have downloaded with Kazaa. As of 3 months ago, 45% of the executables on there were some type of virus. If this is an ongoing problem and has been doing this for awhile you might want to do a format and fresh install and leave kazaa out of your next upgrade. Random freezing in the same spots sounds like bad code or a glitch caused by 3rd party software, NOT XP!
Click to expand...

Yeah I was fearing that... shouldn't NAV detect most of that though? and anything that was downloaded was in .mp3 format... at least I'd think so. Thanks...

Oh and adaware/spybot came up with nothing special.
 
Problem Solved

Alright... I dunno what this is but it was in the startup items "ciadmin3", disabling that seemed to fix the problem... incase anyones curious...

Thanks for the help, the spyware stuff helped a lot... fix a lot of OTHER problems... thanks.
 
Eleven said:
Alright... I dunno what this is but it was in the startup items "ciadmin3", disabling that seemed to fix the problem... incase anyones curious...

Thanks for the help, the spyware stuff helped a lot... fix a lot of OTHER problems... thanks.
Click to expand...


Adware is the best in my opinion, running windows washer by webroot helps a lot of internet issues too. I never liked or even had luck with Norton, been a McAfee fan myself but thats for another day. When you find unknown processes, you can always google them and find them on some website that explains it. I find registry editors are nice too, I use RegCleaner and you can even check whats in your boot and startup menus.
 
Rabidjade said:
Adware is the best in my opinion, running windows washer by webroot helps a lot of internet issues too. I never liked or even had luck with Norton, been a McAfee fan myself but thats for another day. When you find unknown processes, you can always google them and find them on some website that explains it. I find registry editors are nice too, I use RegCleaner and you can even check whats in your boot and startup menus.
Click to expand...
It's called "Ad-aware" and it does what it says pretty well. I use it on my PC to clean out the nasties.
 
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