Is this a virus or disk problem?

[Ngolem]

In the last 3 weeks I have had a problem with my computer locking up.

This is an older machine and I operate under Windows 95 4.00.950B IE 5 5.00.3105.0106 I have a Pentium 1 processor 90 mhz.

While this is certainly a low end machine by today's standards I am able to do 90% of what I want to do and until 3 weeks ago had no problem surfing the internet at all. In fact from a booting up point of view I am up and running faster than most newer machines.

But lately I have ad the problem where I will be working on the internet and I will hear something try to update my HD....then there will be a "ping" and my computer will lock up. Using scandisk on the next reboot....sometimes it will report nothing then eventually it starts to report that the "Free space" on my C drive is under reported and auto fixes it.....then as things progress and this happens a few more times it reports that there are orphaned clusters and then isolates them into a .chk file.

I clean out this and temp files and defrag my drive and everything is fine for a while then it starts happening again.

I also run Ad-aware 6.0 and have come clean ...I use Popup stopper and cookieWall to keep unwanted crap from showing.

Ad-Aware reveals 11 processes running but I can only see 4 of them in the Task Master...How do I reveal what the invisible processes are?

Any guidence is appreciated....Jim

Jim Broadbent

 

[AVChap]

It's most probably a disk problem rearing it's ugly head. I suggest you back up your files now and use a disk diagnostic utility to see the extent of the problem. You may need to get a new disk.

AVChap
... WARNING: The Surgeon General says to take my advise at your own risk.

 

[Ngolem]

I suspect a disk problem as well...could you suggest

1. a disk utility to diagnoze te problem

2. a utility to reveal these invisible processes

Your help is appreciated

Jim Broadbent

 

[AVChap]

Well, you can use something like the Norton Utilities to check the disk. If you're using WinXP, you should be able to see the processes running with the SysInfo utility.

AVChap
... WARNING: The Surgeon General says to take my advise at your own risk.

 

[Ngolem]

I am using Win95 as mentioned above

Jim Broadbent

 

[carrr]

You might try downloading a copy of Process Manager freeware. See if it gives you a look at what you're not seeing:

http://www.efsoftware.com/pm/e.htm

 

[carrr]

...or Process Explorer:

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/procexp.shtml

 

[Ngolem]

Process Manager works well thankyou....nothing unusual there so it must be this old drive dying

Jim Broadbent

 

[dbMark]

You did not mention your drive's brand, so hopefully something here can help you.

These days many drives (but certainly not all) can fail after a year or so. That's probably your problem in this case, but you ought to test it to be sure. If it's bad and still under warranty, contact the manufacturer or vendor. I hope you have a back-up (or several backups) of important files.

Why do you think the warranties for standard drives dropped to one year? (Not becuase they're so good a 3 year warranty isn't needed, as some manufacturers claimed.) Of course if you pay a little extra for the premium drives they can have a 3 or even 5 year warranty. Keep in mind that if you get a new high-speed serial (SATA) IDE drive that it will need at a minimum its own adapter board since your system is older. If you do get a serial drive, then you'd do best getting a new mainboard with built-in SATA, but that would then mean a new CPU, then... You get the idea, get a regular IDE drive unless you want to get a new system. Stick with drives under 137GB since older board may not be able to read drives larger than that.

Western Digital and Maxtor/Quantum have test and repair utilities to download for their drives that will overwrite the entire drive with zeros. I also downloaded one from Seagate, but although it will test almost any drive regardless of manufacturer (unlike the others) it does not wipe the data.

http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/index.htm

http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp

http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/index.html