Good afternoon....

I am hoping that someone can advise me how to check on a few things. I was on here a week or so ago with virus problems and ended up having to reformat and reinstall windows XP. The PC was running well for a few days. Now it's freezing almost immediately with or without internet. For example, i just turned it on to check a file. It let me boot and open Excel and the file, but that was all she wrote...froze. No response at all. I am starting to wonder if my hard drive or something is going? I am at a loss on what to even look at in regards to that. Also...remember I am limited to what I can do once I boot. Thanks in advance for any help!!

Hello,
The problem that you describe could be memory, your proccesor, or other things.
Could you please tell me what you can do with out the machine freezing up?
I am going to need some information about your machine as well;

• What kind of hard drive do you have?
• how much RAM do you have?
• What kind of proccesor do you have?
• And how old is the machine?

Let's see it's an Intel Pentium 4 CPU 2.20 GHz, 2.19 GHz, 256 MB of RAM.
The PC is about 4 years old, but the hard drive had to be replaced about 2 years ago.

It doesn't seem to matter what I am doing on the PC, after a minute or so, it just is non-responsive. I'll click on something and it doesn't do anything. Prior to my reformatting, it kept giving me messages about my virtual memory being low. I haven't loaded much back on the PC. Just XP, drivers, antivirus, Photo Shop, Word and Excel. My C drive says I have only used about 4.45 GB out of 75 GB of memory.

Your C: drive is storage, and your RAM is memory.
I am only telling you this so that you know I am talking about RAM when I say memory.
Your proccesor is fast enough to run XP, however you need at least 512 MB of RAM for XP to work correctly.
However the lower RAM that you have should not cause this issue.
What antivirus are you using? (you only have one I hope).

Would you be willing to try an experiment?
Since you should have another 256 MB of ram, can you get the correct RAM and remove the old ram (replaced with the new) and see if this corrects the problem?
Here is my thinking;

• The machine will load windows so the hard drive is not at fault (it would hang at boot)
• your proccesor is not at fault as the computer does boot in to windows
• The RAM is most likely at fault, unless it is a bad insatall of XP.

I am trying out Kaspersky Antivirus trial currently. I had Norton's with Internet Security prior to my virus issue. I wasn't very happy with them, plus I read that they are a huge memory hog as well. Since I am on a trial, I would be up for suggestions on other products.
I would be willing to update the RAM. I will let you know how that goes.

I would like for you to remove the RAM, and replace it with a 256 MB stick.[list][*]If the problem continues then you can put the old RAM back in and have 512 MB of RAM.[*]If the problem stops then you know your RAM was causing the issue.
Kaspersky is very good, however Avast has a nice free version that works well.
I am using AVG free 7.5, but am told that it will no longer be of use after the end of this year.

Just as a reminder, Norton is notoriously famous for leaving behind all sorts of files, when uninstalled.
Could be there are some left which might be conflicting with Kaspersky which are equally famous for being very sensitive about other Anti-Virus products. Just for considerations

Regards Abydos

Now I am confused.
Did you reinstall norton after the reformat?

Norton's was very hard to uninstall....I had to download their special "tool" to do so. But, I did all of that prior to my reformat and reinstall. So no, they are not both installed at the current time.

I ordered more RAM today, so when it gets here I'll see if that works.

Thanks

Good morning...

Here's an update....

I received the extra memory yesterday and that is all installed. (even got to clean out the dust bunnies in the cast)

That allowed me to do the Windows Updates, the Java updates and all. I still noticed a bit of a hang up and did a bit of research. We had gotten SpySweeper while having all the virus issues. I thought we could use both SpySweeper and Kaspersky's at the same time. They kind of fight each other. So, I uninstalled Spysweeper, asked for a refund and such. Now things seem to be running great. The RAM really does make a huge difference.

Thanks!

This is good news.
If you have any more issues please let me know.