…I am about to tear my hair out!
Things have been getting worse for the last few weeks, and it has gotten absolutely unbearable (hence the lack of recent posting).
I don’t have an answer yet, so I’m going to walk you through it all in case any of you techies have any suggestions. 
At first it seemed like it was just a case of “laggy” Internet service. You’d click a link on a web page, and it would take ages to open the new page and load everything.
Then it got worse. It couldn’t even keep up with typing emails – or blog posts. You’d type a few words fine, but then you’d continue on… and the display wouldn’t. It would freeze. And when it came “back to life”? Sometimes, nothing at all from what you’d typed. Sometimes the first part, sometimes the last. And often, skipping bits and pieces – individual letters missed all over the place, making you look like the world’s most typo-prone typist.
And clicking the cursor back on the first error you notice… May have a 5 second delay. Or 10. Or it won’t go at all.
How do you know when to wait, and when it’s just not going to happen? Clicking again may just make it worse, of course.
The statistics display for my connection shows fairly normal stuff, though. At times it’s obvious the through-put is slow, but it shows normal levels at the maximums if you look at a longer period of time.
Naturally IE also crashes regularly. Sometimes it just dies. Sometimes it starts opening multiple new windows, which sometimes say “HTML Zone” or “Blank Page”.
Most of what I do on the computer is online, these days, but I tested it out and got the same kind of “laggy” behavior when typing a letter in Word. So I figured maybe it WASN’T the Internet connection, after all.
The computer got erros on booting up periodically, as well. Often just an “Improper Shutdown Detected” type message, but sometimes weird, serious errors – once concerning the Users file. Three times I had to use system retore to get running again – but each time it restored to a different point in time, and didn’t back off any changes I could detect and correct.
I started through all the fixes I could think of:
- McAfee Virus protection is and has been in force. It has not done a full scan since 2/22/09, however, since it gets bogged down and freezes up (more on this below).
- I purchased a Registry utility (CleanMyPC), which corrects something now and then, but generally seems happy.
- Defragmenting the hard drive seems to help for a little while (hours), but accomplishes nothing lasting.
- Startup programs were deactivated to clean up what was running in the background.
- No “extra” Applications were running in the Task Manager.
- I purchased a special Adware/Spyware utility (even though McAfee is theoretically supposed to handle those). It found and removed 6 threats and 331 infections. Which did absolutely nothing.
The Task Manager showed some 100+ Processes running and – no surpirse – CPU Usage at 100% (with brief dips lower). Stopping the ones that I recognized, but were non-essential, had no impact.
The only one that seemed to be hogging resources was some PCM system file from CyberLink. Research indicated that it was legitimate but useless, and could be disabled. Unfortunately, that didn’t help, either.
I started Googling everything I didn’t recognize… All of which were verifiably normal. Drat.
McAfee should be doing more, I thought. No matter how slowly, it should eventually be able to scan. Hmmmm…
I ran it on the “Quick Scan” mode – checking only the “most vulnerable areas.” It scanned some 9,000 files, in less than 10 minutes, and found no problems.
So then I tried again running the “Full Scan.” It’s doing the same scan process, just doing it to more files – all the files on the computer, in fact. After 4 hours, it is up almost to the 9,000 file mark (3%, in this case). This is about the same result I’ve had before, when even running it overnight never got us past 31%. Obviously the problem, if we infer from this that there is one, is not in one of those “most vulnerable areas” the Quick Scan checks.
Then this morning another weird thing turned up…
I was editing photos to make an album for 2005. I have a “2005″ folder, and a ” Jewel 2005″ folder, and between the two of them there are almost 1,000 photos. I was trying to sort through and pick the ones to represent the year, crop and adjust in Photoshop, and save in a new folder.
But I couldn’t Save anything. I kept getting weird messages – varying – about them being open somewhere else, or being “Locked,” or what-not. I checked the File properties, and some of them were marked “Read-Only”, and others had “Archive” checked! Why?! I unchecked them – but the errors persisted.
I went up to the folders, and the parent folders. ALL had weird properties checked, and unchecking them even there was similarly ineffective. What in the world is THAT about?
This morning, also, I booted up without the modem plugged in. I know it hasn’t been this bad ever since the first of the year when we got this new hardware, but I’m desperate. And things seemed better!
But I then plugged the modem into Nick’s computer, and it ran fine over there. So back to square one.
And right at the moment, things seem fairly good back on my computer, online… Does that make it “back to square -1″?
Now what?!
A once-and-future full-time RV family shares their adventures - homeschooling, home business, life in an RV, Christian living, interesting travel and dining experiences, you name it...