hey guys,

what would you prescribe for almost XP illiterate to get rid of issues that cannot be found by several antivirus, antimalware and so on? And now symptom are quite annoying: comp shuts down at Firefox and CCleaner opening (IE opens), almost a minute hangup on establishing internet connection, and quite strange for hardware malfunction - mouse click works after 3 second press (I dont know if one click time is configurable at all).

I have no idea, but you could check out Event Viewer (right click My Computer - Menage), and see if you can figure anything out.
Again, if you have another access point to the net and can research error logs, that would speed up the process.

I'm not sure now... Is it BSoD or just a reboot/shutdown?

Edit: Now I've properly read first sentence. Most helpful would be posting error logs on some XP support forums.

Quote from AndRand :

comp shuts down at Firefox and CCleaner opening (IE opens), almost a minute hangup on establishing internet connection, and quite strange for hardware malfunction - mouse click works after 3 second press (I dont know if one click time is configurable at all).

i'm going to take a wild stab and say it could be your fan. if your BIOS doesn't care about the presence of a fan, or it's RPM, then the fan could be stopped. some processors step the frequency down really really low when they overheat instead of shutting the machine off. but it could also be shutting it off when it hits the temperature threshold.

but then again, this could also be some ****ed up virus... it's a lot easier to diagnose these things with the machine in my hands.

Does it happen when you boot in safe mode? Check your CPU temp (SpeedFan can help), but I think that just CPU throttling itself down cannot account for that kind of slowdown...

I think this kind of reboot you can notice here in log (rename .txt to .evt) - those reboots were prolly on SaveDumps and prolly around 19:00 yesterday. Yesterday I put PC on scanning with antivirus and it ended up updating XP at around 3:00am. I am also quite surprised by RasMan in the log - I havent activated Remote ever so I disabled that service recently when I found it active and starting connections - I dont know if it is normal XP action but had mixed feelings about that

And you know... I am not surprised by that... At my job I got an Excel that has problems with adding two numbers...

From a quick look there seems to be problem with an ATi product (most of the warning messages), NTFS file system on C: and something about .Net framework.
I'm really tired so I'll let someone else dig up for now, if there's such volunteer. I don't want to give wrong advice (if I can any at all, tbh)

There's also some weird words in there. Example: "The .NET Runtime Optimization Service v2.0.50727_X86 service entered the zatrzymania state." Eh? :\

I guess that "zatrzymania" is Polish for sleep or idle or something similar...
Can anyone who can actually read that file please resave it in some readable form? All I'm getting is a bunch of barely comprehensive characters with a boatload of boxes...

You did rename it to .evt, right?

I hoped .evt would be in English

MadCatX is right with ""zatrzymania"

Quote from BlackEye :

You did rename it to .evt, right?

:banghead: Damn me, I'll check it out later... in the meantime, does it work all right in safe mode, possibly with all unnecessary devices (wheels, printers and stuff) disconnected?

Quote from AndRand :

those reboots were prolly on SaveDumps

yeah, that's what it looks like... and the stop code suggests a memory problem, but since they're so vague, i could still see this being a cooling+overheat problem. wouldn't hurt to run memtest86 for a loop or two though.

Quote from AndRand :

I think this kind of reboot you can notice here in log (rename .txt to .evt) - those reboots were prolly on SaveDumps and prolly around 19:00 yesterday. Yesterday I put PC on scanning with antivirus and it ended up updating XP at around 3:00am. I am also quite surprised by RasMan in the log - I havent activated Remote ever so I disabled that service recently when I found it active and starting connections - I dont know if it is normal XP action but had mixed feelings about that

And you know... I am not surprised by that... At my job I got an Excel that has problems with adding two numbers...

If I remember correctly it should be (SUM:J4+J5) or something

No, that one actually doesn't work S14.
He should get the right result with the one he made.
I usually have it like "=SUM(J4;J5;...)" which also works.

I'm in a rush, so I'm not able to check out the logs yet, sorry.

it works =j4+j5, =sum(j4:j5) also =sum(j4;j5)
You can stop Excel from recalculating to refresh manualy, but you cannot do it unnoticed by some shortcut

My question is as about my comp: how to get rid of virus like symptoms with no virus detected? btw. how many iexplore instances, is usually opened at one window (regardless tabs) application launch? I got 3, which slightly slowed IE performance.

Quote from AndRand :

My question is as about my comp: how to get rid of virus like symptoms with no virus detected? btw. how many iexplore instances, is usually opened at one window (regardless tabs) application launch? I got 3, which slightly slowed IE performance.

when IE7 came out, they started using the multithreaded model. it's normal to see two for having the window open, and one for each additional tab.

as for there being possible virus activity, I've been using MSE lately. I haven't had the need to run MBAM since (for the ones that AV's don't classify as a virus).

slowness by itself can be caused by various factors, but if your CPU is indeed overheating like I believe it is, then nothing you do is going to fix it, short of replacing the fan.

http://ixbtlabs.com/articles2/ ... ermal-features/index.html

if that occur on different applications with high CPU usage I would suspect overheating. But it happens only with specific applications - ie. I renamed old Mozilla folder and installed FF at different HD clusters to see if it is not a HD failure, but FF reboots systems from new place also.
And I had to run TrendMicro online scan using fresh online installer. After one usage Housecall launcher on HD is corrupt and shows application fatal error on disc scan.

Did you check the CPU temp? Right now I can't think of anything else but this and damaged HDD. Even damaged HDD can slow the system down to a crawl, but since it's much easier to replace HDD than CPU, I'd start with checking that CPU is OK...

Quote from BlackEye :

No, that one actually doesn't work S14.
He should get the right result with the one he made.
I usually have it like "=SUM(J4;J5;...)" which also works.

I'm in a rush, so I'm not able to check out the logs yet, sorry.

Thanks that's what I meant! And Yeah it's a strange one, I've always done it using the "SUM" methord and last time I tried the simple "+" it shat itself. Probably was the user (mine) error.

AndRand, there's also NTFS error in the event log which is the most probably source of your problems, it may indicate hard drive problem, or filesystem failure...you should re-format your HDD volume to NTFS again, there is probably no other fix.
But at first run a memtest, just to be sure (no relationship with hdd failure, but the symptoms are almost same)
edit: and make a backup ASAP

I'm with majod on this, it might be just the filesystem structure that got corrupted and a format would fix it, but it's also possible that your HDD is giving it. Definitely backup all your valuable data now...

Speedfan has a built in disk health checker. Not always that accurate but can give early warning of impending failure.

Quote from majod :

AndRand, there's also NTFS error in the event log which is the most probably source of your problems

not always.

when the cpu overheats it does really ****ed up stuff... programs can (and sometimes will) crash all over the place, and it can also corrupt the hard drive. (think about it, everything goes through the cpu, if the cpu messes up then who knows what can happen, it might calculate 2+2=4, but then write 942 to the disk and transmit 267 over ethernet.)

in the event log, there is also mention to the registry being corrupted, this is also synonymous with overheats and/or memory failure.

if the hard drive is dying, you would see these instead, and lots of them. i don't see any of those in your logs.

Quote from bunder9999 :

not always.

when the cpu overheats it does really ****ed up stuff... programs can (and sometimes will) crash all over the place, and it can also corrupt the hard drive.

in the event log, there is also mention to the registry being corrupted, this is also synonymous with overheats and/or memory failure.

if the hard drive is dying, you would see these instead, and lots of them. i don't see any of those in your logs.

I haven't seen an overheated CPU causing this kind of problems for a long while. Perhaps if it were overclocked, but there are more entries in the log that suggest something might be wrong with his HDD.

Maybe it's not the HDD failing but just badly corrupted NTFS structure, in this case running "chkdsk" could help.

Quote from bunder9999 :

not always.

when the cpu overheats it does really ****ed up stuff... programs can (and sometimes will) crash all over the place, and it can also corrupt the hard drive. (think about it, everything goes through the cpu, if the cpu messes up then who knows what can happen, it might calculate 2+2=4, but then write 942 to the disk and transmit 267 over ethernet.)

in the event log, there is also mention to the registry being corrupted, this is also synonymous with overheats and/or memory failure.

if the hard drive is dying, you would see these instead, and lots of them. i don't see any of those in your logs.

Can you explain why would CPU do something like that? because I can't and I don't think this would happen when it overheats. All CPUs shut system down when overheating, unless its like 15 years old CPU. And actually I can't imagine why would CPU do wrong math operations or write to a wrong sector when its overheating...a CPU is synced by system clock and can reach only scrict voltage values for a short period of time, so transistors should not be affected by leaking current (hope its the right term in english), unless its extremly high temperature for a very long period of time - which can not happen because as I said when CPU reaches its limit its shuts down.

But you're right, I'm not 100% sure if the HDD is causing the failure, but it's my guess and that's how I would act...and I recommended running memory test at first to make sure memory modules are allright. BTW once I experienced NTFS failure on my computer while I was playing prince of persia warrior within, I didn't have any messages, no symptoms, everything was okay and suddenly BSOD appeared with an NTFS error and I was unable to boot or do anything else...I had to format whole HDD - all partitions. I guess when something fcks up it must be in way you would never expect

CPU's can fail to complete equations correctly if they are overheating and either shutting down or damaged from the heat. Even some modern AMD's will stay on until they have melted and caught fire...

Intels have the best heat protection, but also can be a combination of CPU and motherboard!

Anyway I'm going to bake a cake.