Computer Anomalies - Windows XP

A repaired disk drive is never going to be reliable!, buy a new one they don't cost a fortune an make a fresh start.

I agree for 'pooter #2. With the 1st one, I would back up any important files, then reformat the hard drive and re-install XP. Kind of a long way around, but it would help.

Strange one for the first PC, no idea.

For the second PC, check if your CD ROM or Burner is NOT on the same cable as the hard disk.....if it is, separate them as most mainboards have two sockets so that you can easily have 2 x HD on one socket and 2 x CD or DVD on the other.

Also make sure that when two similar devices are on one cable that one is a slave and the other master....

Check, if you have good cables and that they are "good enough" for the HD you have, modern HDs need special cables (that fit the same sockets) to get full speed.....this is for say 5 years or more so...just flat cables are OK for CDs and DVDs only.....

Maybe a cable is defective.....

If you have two HDs on one cable, maybe the other HD has a problem....

"one of them I cannot log on to ebay or ups tracking website. running windows xp home edition. Until this started I could. just started doing it out of the blue. When I try and go there, it comes up "internet explorer cannot display the web page"

Make sure you have purged old web page info from your PC cache. Although very unlikely for you, as you cannot access two specific sites, I had a problem with one site that moved servers earlier this year and eventually it was tracked to my ISP's server cache containing the old site info - when they purged it I could access the new webpages.

I have a similar issue with windows xp. I used to watch programs online from abc.com and nbc.com and now I can't. They won't open.

It's my understanding that it might be from a windows autofix to the browser pop up blocker.

I wouldn't put it past microsoft to but bugs in xp to get people to switch to vista.

With you second computer. I don't know if this is the same issue but I did an analysis on my harddrive and all the free space was red.

I did a defragment and was alerted that the fragmented files were too large to move.

I ended up doing a reformat on my harddrive and reinstalling my OS. When installing programs that I had on there previously I had to watch my harddrive because it seemd to create a lot of large fragmented files. I had to do a defragment each time I completed an installation or download.

I haven't had any trouble with it lately.

There's only one place for a drive like that, the trash bin unless you want to spend more time doing computer maintainence than operating.

This occured about 4 months ago. I've greatly reduced my downloading activity and stick with only the activity that I do most commonly and haven't had that issue come up again. I do a check disk and defrag about once a week or after each download or new install.

If it does happen again then I will replace the harddrive.

Do you run software to get rid of Malware, have you a good antivirus program?

I have Kaspersky and Spybot.

You also need "Spybot - Search and destroy". Together with Ad-Aware, they get rid of most unwanted stuff, but neither alone does it.....really strange, please do not ask me why!!!

You're right and that is what I have.

All work on a PC creates fragmented files, especially deleting and adding new ones...

A good defragmenter (basically anything other than the windows one!) is needed. Once a week should be enough in the worst case....

It is your computer's way of telling you that you should use FIREFOX instead of Internet Explorer.

Over 95% of all Viruses and Hacks are written to exploit flaws in Internet Explorer. Dump it!

Computer 2 has a bad HDD.

Copy your important information off of it and replace the drive.

OOhh, Firefox. Great point, I missed that. I hang my head in shame. I switched over a year ago, and I can't believe how much better my box runs. IE is such a memory hog, if you don't have a gig of RAM, it runs much more slowly than it should. I have a little freeware memory monitor on my laptop that has a realtime display of free memory. When I switched to Firefox, my free RAM went up almost 100 Mb. Unbelievable.

I'll check Firefox out, thank you.

My daughter's computer did the SAME thing, IE would no longer allow her to upload pictures to her SNAPFISH site. She could LOOK at what was already there, but not ADD anything. I tried good old 'system restore' and nothing worked, until I downloaded Firefox and that allowed her to use the site again. Something got corrupted or added to I-E, I guess.

Yes, pooter #2 should go in trash along with Windows ME.

By the way, if "you all" feel your machine is purring like a kitten, do yourself a favor and go to SYSTEM RESTORE and then ADD A RESTORE POINT for the current date and time. Call it a "good point". Windows trails off older points and you may not be able to get back to a nice spot.

You should do that AGAIN if your box is running great and you just installed a program that also runs good with no bad side-effects.Make sure you label what is special about the restore point.

Update on the problem with getting on ebay and a couple of other websites. Found a thread on a bulletin board somewhere a couple of weeks ago. The problem was not being able to get on a couple of websites all of a sudden. The fix was to change an application data file name from host to oldhost. Thought I'd mention this if anyone else was having this problem. I could about kick myself on the vanishing e-mails. Should have found it sooner. At some point, the archive file probably got moved to the temp folder. So every time I'd clean up the disk and dump the temp download folder it would empty my e-mail folders. Changed the archive to put the e-mails in a separate folder. Don't know how or when it got changed but when you have kids around the house some strange things happen. :)