Computer Experts: Computer getting the hiccups

[Bob Weisner]

Hi:

Well, about 5 to 8 times a day for the past 2 weeks or so, my computer has been getting the hiccups or whatever they call it. Here is what happens.

I have everything installed properly. I installed Norton internet securety 2006 this morning. Every now and then, the computer will freeze up. The computer won't let me do a thing. press all the buttons and played with the mouse, but nothing happens. I have to turn the computer off and then turn it back on again to get things working right again. It is like the computer hangs up on something but I don't know what is causing it.

Then the Norton kicks in with a message that Outlook is not the default email or something to that effect. I have'nt used outlook or outlook express email since I switched internet services. How do I get the software to stop giving those messages?

When I ran the norton internet security , it said everything was running fine after I did the complete scan of the computer

So, anyone got an idea as to what is wrong with the computer?

Thanks,

[Ken Garlock]

Bob, have you checked Microsoft for all the recommended updates for your version of Windows? I am a firm believer that you have fewer problems when you keep your software up to date.

Second, my biased opinion is that you need to uninstall that garbage from Norton and never ever buy another symantec product. I have seen several perfectly good products bought by them and subsequently turned into a pile of ordorific semisolid brown matter. :mad: I use the McAfee virus product, but there are others that highly rated also. I am sure that other posters have good recommendations.

As always, my opinions are but a dot in the time-space continuum.:confused:

[Troy Hawkins]

Have you tried scanning for spyware? Spybot Search & Destroy has always seemed to clean a lot of my computer hiccups. It is free to download and use just do a search.

[John Hart]

Norton is looking for something... A program, a utility, a DLL or something. Hard to say what exactly(at least from here). But with all the objectivity I can muster, I agree with Ken. Norton used to be good....but all the good programmers that used to work there, must have died. I don't recommend Symantec products anymore.

[Bob Weisner]

Just finished running the Spybot program. It found something called "Backweb Lite" What is that ?

[John Hart]

Thats a piece of adware that HP put on your computer...probably when you installed a printer. HP uses that to check for updates automatically on your system. It is unneeded

[Bob Weisner]

I think I may have a clue as to what the problem is. I have an old version of Microsoft Office installed on the computer. I somehow always seem to have some sort of hang up with that program when I am running it. Now, this is what I would like to do:

I was checking out this software program called OpenOffice. I think it is very similar to Microsoft Office. Can I transfer the documents that I had made up using Microsoft Word and Works and put them into the OpenOffice program? Is that a difficult thing to do?

Thanks,

[Ken Garlock]

Bob, I just noticed that you didn't say what version of Windows you are running. If by chance it is Windows ME, RUN, do not walk, to your nearest software store and get Windows XP home edition for a little under $100. Windows ME was a piece of junk, plain and simple.:(

A couple other ideas:

How much memory do you have? These days, 512 MB is nearly a minimum.

Have you defragged you disk lately? Executive Software makes a product called Disk Keeper that beats anything from MS by a country mile.

Check the amount of page space you have allocated. Do you let Windows manage the size, or did you set a range.

[Andrew Ault]

OpenOffice is great. I use it all the time. My wife uses it in her businesses. My familiy now uses it instead of MS Office. For our purposes, it is as good or better than MS Office. It installs and uninstalls cleanly and comes out with regular updates.

The 2.0 version is now out and works great.

OO reads and writes MS Office files, if you want it to. I use it to fix Word files that have become screwy. You do not need to do ANYTHING to your files...just open them with OpenOffice.

One nice thing is that it is free and perfectly legal to copy and use. No one in our family uses illegal copies of software, so it is nice to find a free alternative that is of high quality and free.

Another nice thing is that it runs on Windows and also other platforms. My wife uses Windows and my home machine is Linux and it works well on both.

Google has started to fund and provide programmers for OO, so it will probably become better and better.

[Bob Weisner]

Bob, I just noticed that you didn't say what version of Windows you are running. If by chance it is Windows ME, RUN, do not walk, to your nearest software store and get Windows XP home edition for a little under $100. Windows ME was a piece of junk, plain and simple.:(

A couple other ideas:

How much memory do you have? These days, 512 MB is nearly a minimum.

Have you defragged you disk lately? Executive Software makes a product called Disk Keeper that beats anything from MS by a country mile.

Check the amount of page space you have allocated. Do you let Windows manage the size, or did you set a range.


Ken:

I have Windows XP Home Edition installed on the computer. The computer has a Pentium 4 on it and has 512 of RAM. The computer is almost 3 years old, so I don't know if that has anything to do with that. Probably will get a new computer next year or send the computer in for an overhaul or upgrade the system.

I have defragged the computer and it says that there is 79% free space.

Thanks,

Bob

[Bob Weisner]

Ok, Got the OpenOffice installed and everything SEEMS:confused: to be running fine now. Here is the BIG!!!! question!! Can I delete the Microsoft Office program? Or, should I leave it in? The program is Microsoft Office 2000.. Don't know why I got the 2000 version instead of something newer, but that is what was installed on the computer.

Thanks,

Bob

[Andrew Ault]

I'd uninstall Office. Like I said, OpenOffice works fine. MS Office is likely to leave some components behind, but that is usually Ok.

[Vaughn McMillan]

I second (or third) the motion regarding the Norton/Symantec products, with the caveat that I'm biased. That said, it does sound like an Office problem.

...

Have you defragged you disk lately? Executive Software makes a product called Disk Keeper that beats anything from MS by a country mile.

The company name recently changed to Diskeeper Corporation, but a Google search for Diskeeper will get to all the product info you could want. Diskeeper really is the 800-pound gorilla in the defragger market, but it's because it does the job.

[Disclosure: I've been a part of the Diskeeper development team for nearly 15 years -- dating back to the VMS days. I've written or edited virtually every word of user documentation (manuals, helps files, screen text) since 1991. And I apologize in advance if our sales guys have ever pestered you. ;) ]

- Vaughn

[Ken Garlock]

[Disclosure: I've been a part of the Diskeeper development team for nearly 15 years -- dating back to the VMS days. I've written or edited virtually every word of user documentation (manuals, helps files, screen text) since 1991. And I apologize in advance if our sales guys have ever pestered you. ;) ] - Vaughn

Vaughn, there are 3 products that I use for general system maintenance, Diskeeper, Partition Magic, and Drive Image. Both Drive Image and Partition Magic have saved my bacon a couple times in the past. Unfortunately the symantec search and destroy group bought them both. Try and find anything on Drive Image, and you get a sales pitch on ghost. :mad: :mad:

[Vaughn McMillan]

I hear ya Ken on the Partition Magic and Drive Image. Definitely part of my bag o' tricks for bacon saving. I guess I'll just be keeping my pre-Symantec versions of both. I have a similar problem with the Help authoring software I use, RoboHELP. It used to be a great product, but it's been bought out by Macromedia, and in their attempts to make it a Flash delivery vehicle, they've stopped development on the parts I need, and instead are offering a bunch of things I can't use. A bunch of ex-RoboHELP engineers have started their own company to fill the gap, and I'm anxiously awaiting the Beta of their first product.

- Vaughn

[Curt Harms]

Diskeeper, Partition Magic, and Drive Image. Both Drive Image and Partition Magic have saved my bacon a couple times in the past. Unfortunately the symantec search and destroy group bought them both. Try and find anything on Drive Image, and you get a sales pitch on ghost. :mad: :mad:[/QUOTE]

Hi Ken and all-

Here's a possible replacement for the Symantic acquired programs:
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/index.html.

I use image for DOS & Windows. {DOS??!:eek: ). I keep an image of my C: partition on an extended partition of my hard drive. If the Windows partition pukes, I can boot from a floppy with the image for DOS file on it. Whoda thunk you could have a 100 k file that does something useful?;) I can restore from the image on the extended partition and I'm back in business. All programs, email settings, just like the computer was at the time the image was created. I also have self-booting CD's with images from earlier times, so I don't restore images with problems. With the viruses and crapware out there, being able to restore to earlier configurations can be USEFUL! Windows has a roll back feature, but I understand that only restores the registry to its earlier state and doesn't get rid of hostile files etc.

Image for DOS & Windows isn't perfect. DOS support for writing DVD's isn't perfect, and for [U]Image for Windows[U] to work correctly, you need to install a free utility to lock the volume. Still, it's well worth what it costs.

I haven't tried their other programs. Hope this helps.

Curt

[Jim Becker]

I've not use the Norton/Symantic applications for years, but I also bagged McAfee in favor of AVG. (licensed version). Big kick up in system performance...there was just too much going on with McAfee. It was sucking the life out of my machine!
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I've also been using OpenOffice for some time now and have been very pleased with it. I still do use Outlook 2003 'cause I actually paid for it a couple years ago, but one of these days it will be replaced with Thunderbird from Mozila and I will not be using any MS Office application on my personal machine. Too bloated.

[Ken Garlock]

Curt, thanks for the information. I have filed it for future reference.

I have backed up LOML's computer using your approach to putting an image on a second partition. The thing I fear the most is a disk hardware failure. In that case, my backup is gone, just like the primary partition.

On MY:) system, I do my backups to a standalone USB connected drive using Drive Image. Drive Image is on a bootable CD that can hopefully do the restore. I am a devout SCSI user that sometimes wonders about these lesser modes of disk IO.;) :rolleyes:

[Lee DeRaud]

I am a devout SCSI user that sometimes wonders about these lesser modes of disk IO.;) :rolleyes:For some indeterminate value of "lesser".:p In my late career, I had a lab-full of Sun workstations and the only thing that ever gave us problems were the SCSI devices.:eek:

[Ken Garlock]

For some indeterminate value of "lesser".:p In my late career, I had a lab-full of Sun workstations and the only thing that ever gave us problems were the SCSI devices.:eek:

Interesting problem there. Before I retired from TI, we had a room full of Sun servers, including several of their 9000 series. Our important data was on intelligent Symmetrix disk arrays from EMC ,all of which were SCSI devices internally. They had their own version of raid-5. As I recall we had about 2 terabytes of SAP data on-line, and every night around midnight a total internal copy kicked off that took until nearly noon to complete. Yes, there were occasional disk failures, but with hot swap raid 5 arrays everywhere, you could fix the problem in minutes with no down time.

TI was, and probably still is, crazy about system availability. Our up time availability goal was 6 sigma, about 10 minutes of unscheduled down time per YEAR. I don't think we ever made it to the goal, but we came darn close.

Ahh yes, the good old days of occasional 36 hr work days, and explaining to knowledgeable managers why the system went casters up and how you plan to fix it so it will not happen again. :eek: