Thread: Computer Problems!

Oh no, eMachines.

Do you have anti virus? ( www.grisoft.com ) Sounds like something is sucking resources.

Sounds like you may have someone trying to hack your machine with a lot of lan card interrupts and packets or a device in the PC malfunctioning and causing spurious device interrupts at a high frequency. It could be just about anything like a bad mouse connection (check the mouse cable and clean it), or a keyboard that is intermittent or the serial port etc.

Try swapping out things with another pc that you know works - look at the mouse first.

If its a network hack attempt you will see a lot of modem lights blinking on and off rapidly. Are you behind a firewall?
Also check your running processes and CPU utilization to see if some process is running away and chewing up your CPU cycles (control alt D in windows XP brings up the task manager to monitor it). Also with the task manager you can check for lots of network traffic. Disconnet yourself from the internet and try typing a document in ms-word and see if it is slow. Isolate the problem to the network or to the pc.

Mudge, I've got Norton Anti virus but it's not showing anything, however i stopped subscribing to the updates like 3 weeks ago. OD, I'm almost postive it's just in the internet because I have no problems with MSWord or Outlook.

Ahh, good thinking OC, I had a NIC die on me a few months ago actually. Latency in applications was great, but when I did a ping -t to a local domain I was dropping packets, about every 1 in 5.

RC, try going to the command prompt, and typing
ping -t www.ironmagazineforums.com [ENTER] (hit enter)

My situation did not make characters dissapear but it made surfing very frustrating. This is all assuming you are on DSL or cable, if you are on a modem this likely does not apply.

There is a new Worm out these days....I was hit on Monday....The worm is called Blaster or mblast.exe. This actually shutsdown your machine. Check out the downloads section on www.microsoft.com to fix the security hole before you get hacked.

You might consider cleaning up your temp files and cookies too.

Also - look at downloading spybot. It's freeware to help aide against Ads and unwanted popups.

YM

What OS is it?

It could also be a memory issue. Or disk space. If you are running nt, 2000 or XP you may want to check the page file size and make sure you have ample space left.

I think he has pretty much isolated the problem to the network only. Now he needs to find out if it's because he has a bad network card or is being hacked has a bad ISP withlots of lag or whatever...

Originally posted by OceanDude
I think he has pretty much isolated the problem to the network only. Now he needs to find out if it's because he has a bad network card or is being hacked has a bad ISP withlots of lag or whatever...

Unless he has stated something I did not see... (and taking for granted that he truelly doesn't have a virus) these kinda problems

I will start scrolling down a page like a normally would, which would usually be perfectly smooth, and it's all choppy. It it just doesn't respond right away. Another problem is when I'm typing something on the internet, like this post, Characters don't come up immediately like they used to. Like if I type this sentence normally like it won't show up 'til a second later.

are usually due to memory issues or disk space.

I have never seen a bad nic give you sluggish typing issues.

Originally posted by Tboy
I have never seen a bad nic give you sluggish typing issues.

Then you have never seen a PC with spurious interrupts.

Forground tasks slow to a crawl when a defective device is flooding the PC bus with thousands of interrupts per second and context switching the application into a dormant state to process the interrupt and then returning to foreground and resuming the suspended application - over and over again. This can also be cuased by device conflicts that are both using the same interrupt (if he recently installed any new devices in an incompatible way). I use to program device drivers and work at this level in the OS - believe me I know about this. This can be caused by anything that can generate an interrupt - Video card, LAN card, mouse, keyboard, harddrive, parallel port, sound card, bad interrupt register chip, DMA controller, Memory bus arbitration, Real Time Clock, stuck on/off/eject switch etc. etc. etc.

But, these are very high reliability devices (in general) so I am still suspicious that he might be getting hacked or have some background subscription service that is tieing up the network and preventing the video to refresh the display often enough. Could also be bad memory for that matter or a lose cable inside. I would probably start reseating PC cards making sure to not touch any conductive pins unless I was grounded to prevent static damage.

Originally posted by OceanDude
Then you have never seen a PC with spurious interrupts.

Forground tasks slow to a crawl when a defective device is flooding the PC bus with thousands of interrupts per second and context switching the application into a dormant state to process the interrupt and then returning to foreground and resuming the suspended application - over and over again. This can also be cuased by device conflicts that are both using the same interrupt (if he recently installed any new devices in an incompatible way). I use to program device drivers and work at this level in the OS - believe me I know about this. This can be caused by anything that can generate an interrupt - Video card, LAN card, mouse, keyboard, harddrive, parallel port, sound card, bad interrupt register chip, DMA controller, Memory bus arbitration, Real Time Clock, stuck on/off/eject switch etc. etc. etc.

But, these are very high reliability devices (in general) so I am still suspicious that he might be getting hacked or have some background subscription service that is tieing up the network and preventing the video to refresh the display often enough. Could also be bad memory for that matter or a lose cable inside. I would probably start reseating PC cards making sure to not touch any conductive pins unless I was grounded to prevent static damage.

OD

Ya know, Sometimes lifes problems has simple solutions.

Originally posted by Tboy


OD

Ya know, Sometimes lifes problems has simple solutions.

The simple solutions are rarely legal. BUt I guess it's still not a crime to execute your PC.

Originally posted by Mudge
Ahh, good thinking OC, I had a NIC die on me a few months ago actually. Latency in applications was great, but when I did a ping -t to a local domain I was dropping packets, about every 1 in 5.

RC, try going to the command prompt, and typing
ping -t www.ironmagazineforums.com [ENTER] (hit enter)

My situation did not make characters dissapear but it made surfing very frustrating. This is all assuming you are on DSL or cable, if you are on a modem this likely does not apply.

Mudge what do you mean command prompt?

Start> Run> CMD> then click ok.

MUdge, I pinged the site succesfully. I keep getting this:
Reply from 64.191.30.119 bytes=32 time=71ms TTL=49
The time thing varies, anywhere from 50-150, usually lower than a hundred. I get a new one of these line like every .75 seconds. What does that mean? The box is a long line of these lines, identical except for the times, and sometimes it will say "Request Timed out"

Is that good or bad?

RC, as long as its not timing out like every 4-10 packets you are fine as far as the NIC goes. If your on 98/ME/2k/XP you can try reinstalling your OS, select UPGRADE If it gives you that option (depends which your installing) instead of new copy. This sometimes fixes things, or there is a file checker but I usually just run a reinstall.

How often is it timing out?

Pinging ironmagazineforums.com [64.191.30.119] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 64.191.30.119: bytes=32 time=107ms TTL=52
Reply from 64.191.30.119: bytes=32 time=101ms TTL=52
Reply from 64.191.30.119: bytes=32 time=101ms TTL=52
Reply from 64.191.30.119: bytes=32 time=102ms TTL=52
Reply from 64.191.30.119: bytes=32 time=102ms TTL=52
Reply from 64.191.30.119: bytes=32 time=102ms TTL=52
Reply from 64.191.30.119: bytes=32 time=103ms TTL=52
Reply from 64.191.30.119: bytes=32 time=103ms TTL=52
Reply from 64.191.30.119: bytes=32 time=106ms TTL=52
Reply from 64.191.30.119: bytes=32 time=121ms TTL=52

No timeouts for me...

Originally posted by Mudge
RC, as long as its not timing out like every 4-10 packets you are fine as far as the NIC goes. If your on 98/ME/2k/XP you can try reinstalling your OS, select UPGRADE If it gives you that option (depends which your installing) instead of new copy. This sometimes fixes things, or there is a file checker but I usually just run a reinstall.

How often is it timing out?

I'm not sure if I can reinstall my operating system. I bought the computer new with XP pre-installed, They didn't give you a back up copy of XP. Whats a file checker and where can I run that? I dont know what the problem is, but everything non-internet related seems to be running smoothly. BTW I'm on a cable modem. I ran the command prompt again and it hasn't timed out once. I just pray it's not a virus, where can I download the patch to stop that new virus everyone keeps talking about?

They should have given you a sytem restore CD, although thats not as good as the real deal since it WILL wipe out everything.

You dont have the big worm, it will reboot your computer every ~60 seconds, I have seen a box that had it, XP with no SP1.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/tre...n/MS03-026.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/tre...n/MS03-026.asp

System File Checker XP
http://www.networkclue.com/os/Windows/commands/sfc.php

What if I uninstalled INternet Explorer and then reinstalled it? That's the only thing having problems I thought maybe it might be that? Then again how could I get online do download Internet Explorer without a browser? the irony. I wonder how I got it in the first place.

And can you guys please excuse the typo's I've been making lately, It's hard to type when what you write doesn't show up until 2 sentences later.

It is not easy to uninstall Internet Explorer, its considered a hack. A reinstall/update is fine, http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com

What is your CPU useage at when idle? Right click on your taskbar, and hit TASK MANAGER

Originally posted by Mudge
It is not easy to uninstall Internet Explorer, its considered a hack. A reinstall/update is fine, http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com

What is your CPU useage at when idle? Right click on your taskbar, and hit TASK MANAGER

My CPU usage is normal when idle. I figured out the problem. It was with Internt Explorer. I downloaded the Netscape browser and everything runs smooth like it used to for IE. Who knows what happened to Internet Explorer. After all those complicated possibilities is was just IE. I am still gonig to download that patch though I'll tell you that much.

Did you change any of the defaults in IE or add any plugins or special tools integral to IE? Something to check. Also XP lets you fall back to an old checkpoint automatically based on date if you know you have dones something and want to back out of it.

I haven't liked Nutscrape sinc 4.06 but if IE wont work with an update well, I dunno what to say. Did you even try Windowsupdate?

The MS Windows updates can be tricky and finicky. When I installed my first service patch my PC would not even work on the internet. Fortunately, it is very easy to back out of changes in XP to a prior checkpoint. The order which you apply the patches is very critical - expecially when doing security updates. I always do single updates only now and make sure it still works rather than batching them all together. Just been burned too many times.