GOOD-BYE

Just might be the computer itself and not a virus. The first 3 problems sounds like not enough RAM to me. How many programs are running in the background? Updated virus protection? Why not just reformat the computer and do a clean reinstall of the programs or take it to a trusted computer shop and talk it over with them.

On Thu, 13 Nov 2003 02:54:45 GMT, "SUNNYVALE_PLASTICVALE" shared this with the world:

And your caps-lock key is stuck.

Seriously, your computer's behavior sounds like what I used to have happen routinely when I was using Windows95.

Computers can't operate indefinitely without a bit of maintenance (software, not usually hardware). Try running your car for 3 or 4 years without changing the oil/tires/filters and see what happens.

As much as the people who sell computers (and Microsoft) want us to think computers are maintainence-free, it aint so.

If you don't have the skill/interest in doing it yourself, many computer shops will clean-up/disinfect your machine for around $50.

Of course, this is more for the benefit of others, since you aren't here any more.

Kent

Great! Another person who has no clue what is really wrong with their computer so it must be "viruses and hackers". It's amazing how many people say that because that's the limit of their computer knowledge. It's always got to be someone else's fault, not theirs

What you described happens to plenty of computers that have never even been hooked up to the Internet.

What operating software are you using? Win 95, 98, ME. NT, etc? When was the last time you did routine maintenance to it (scandisk, defrag, etc)? Have you run the lastest security patches on it? That information could help alot to determining what the really cause is.

Once again, it's always their fault, not yours.

I really doubt that a "hacker" could care about a little operation like yours.

Here's the test. You say its a virus. What virus did your anitvirus software tell you that you are infected with? Let me guess, you don't have antivirus software. Then it's probably a good thing that you're no longer going to be online.

Reminds me of my old software development days: many not-so-adept programmers first blamed any problem on the hardware rather than go to the trouble of debugging their programs. They were almost 100% wrong.

It the original poster raises a valid point: PCs are just too damn complicated and unreliable (all of 'em: Windows, Mac, Linux, whatever). Systems like Mac OS X and Windows XP with their multi-tasking, networking, multi-user design, are more powerful than VAX VMXS was a couple of decades ago, and we had data centers and professional operators doing backups, software updates, user management, network configuration et al. Now, Grandma and Cousin Dave have to deal with almost all of the same issues.

There is no other home appliance which is so knowledge intensive and the users so knowledge deficient; after all, they are not IT professionals. Ellison was probably right about the Network Computer, but it's time has past.

Ed.

in article snipped-for-privacy@corp.supernews.com, Dave at snipped-for-privacy@killthespam.juno.com wrote on 11/13/03 5:03 PM:

Then it's probably a good thing that you're no longer going to be online. ^

How about trying to help the guy out? Many, if not most on this group, use a computer, they do not work with them. How many of us, with extensive experience, have fought a bug and had no clue? Flaming does no good for the group other than providing excruciatingly hillarious lurking entertainment. We've lost a wealth of MR experience on this group because users get tired of the flame wars. Where is Fred Dabney? And thanks for hanging around Bill and Thor and the rest of the folks who can take credit for helping out a fellow hobbyist.

bg

I thought that was the intent of my post. Help. I been through some of the same problems he had and it turned out to be software issues. My computer was just recently freezing up and when I turned off a program, the problem stopped.

Of course, sometimes just turning the damn computer off and rebooting makes a hell of a difference too!!! :-)

But it couldn't happen to him, right?

Ya know, when this "SUNNYVALE_PLASTICVALE" user first showed up he was yelling (typing in all caps) and people VERY POLITELY tried to help him out there and suggested to turn the caps lock off, explaining what the protocol was.

And what happened? This character blew up and started calling everyone names, basically telling folks to F-off for suggesting he change anything in his ways.

Obviously that user is a mental case.

Do you really think he wants help with the way he wrote his post? Rambling on about viruses, hackers, going out of business, and most of it WHILE SHOUTING AT THE ENTIRE NEWSGROUP?

If he needed help all he had to do was type some sort of message (in lower case of coarse) stating simply what was heppening and asking for ideas. A short list detailing his PC stats (OS, RAM, etc) would probably go a long way towards helping him. But instead he blamed just about everything else but himself for his computer problems. I'm willing to bet that if there is any sort of "real" problem then it is a virus. He probably received one of those "Microsoft Security update" emails that have been floating around the psat few months and opened it. BAM!! PC goes wacky because it's now infected.

The computer version of the black helicopter crowd.

Ken (NY) Chairman, Department Of Redundancy Department ___________________________________ email:

"It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise revenues in the long run is to cut rates now. " --President John F. Kennedy, speech to NY Economic Club, 1962

Q: What the hardest thing about rollerblading? A: Telling your parents you?re gay.

Of course, if he HAD Norton Anti Virus (or any other good AV program...) it would have caught it on the way in.

But as I mentioned elsewhere, there are those who think "It can't happen to me because I don't give out my e-mail on the Internet". Little do they realize, it's everywhere just logging onto the Internet, without the benefit of entering it anywhere. And they continue to operate without the benefit of AV programs.

I was up against a similar experience last year in that my computer was getting slower and slower and too many open programs were causing lockups and blue screens. I had a 466MHz, 256MB-RAM, 8.4GB-HDD computer running Windows 98SE along with several memory-intensive programs. The hard drive had over 6 GB of data stored on it and I was running MS Publisher 2002. Trying to run it and another memory-intensive program (like a photo editor) usually caused problems. Sometimes just running the photo editor caused problems!

Finally desided to "bite the bullet" and go with a faster computer, with more capacity but didn't like anything available on the market and so chose to build my own. It wasn't THAT difficult, although I did run into the occasional glitch. I was following an article in a magazine but upgrading to a higher capability part from time to time than the one suggested in the article. The challenge was that other than changing out a RAM module in the old computer, I had no idea how anything else was assembled or how it all worked. Kinda like handlaying track for the first time or building a complicated building model, or for that matter, a layout! I had to do a lot of reading and research first.

It's debatable if I saved any money building it myself but I did learn a great deal about what all the bits and pieces do and it IS a lot more capable than the old one was! Funny thing was that over the 6 months I was building it my formerly "high-speed computer"(1.74GHz,

1.3GB-RAM, 60GB-HDD) last September became a "not quite so fast computer" in January, let alone what's out there now but I don't have any more problems with programs locking up or running several at once and the new software requires far more capacity than my old computer ever thought of needing!

I'm running Windows XP-Pro, MS Office Suite 2002 with MS Publisher (but not FrontPage) and several others. I figured it would take about a year to get everything I wanted including the software and I was just about right.

BTW, last month I bought a laptop that is faster than my desktop (1.8GHz)!

Paul Voelker

bg wrote: How about trying to help the guy out? Many, if not most on this group, use a computer, they do not work with them. How many of us, with extensive experience, have fought a bug and had no clue? Flaming does no good for the group other than providing excruciatingly hillarious lurking entertainment. =A0 We've lost a wealth of MR experience on this group because users get tired of the flame wars. Where is Fred Dabney? And thanks for hanging around Bill and Thor and the rest of the folks who can take credit for helping out a fellow hobbyist.

----------------------------------------------------

I agree with you, bg.

Thank you, bg! Made my day a pleasant one!

Bill Bill's Railroad Empire N Scale Model Railroad:

History of N Scale: Links to over 700 helpful sites:

I'm still happy with my home-built dual processor 700MHz all-SCSI machine with 768MB of RAM - a fast disk system and plenty of RAM make up for a lot of processors that run at 1/3 to 1/4 the speed of currently available ones. And the dual processors help in running programs and com tasks at the same time.

=>Paul V. Voelker wrote: =>> my formerly "high-speed computer"(1.74GHz, =>> 1.3GB-RAM, 60GB-HDD) last September became a "not quite so fast =>> computer" in January, let alone what's out there now =>

=>I'm still happy with my home-built dual processor 700MHz =>all-SCSI machine with 768MB of RAM - a fast disk system =>and plenty of RAM make up for a lot of processors that run =>at 1/3 to 1/4 the speed of currently available ones. And =>the dual processors help in running programs and com tasks =>at the same time.

Any machine running Win2000/XP is running slower than it needs to, on account of those bloated an inefficient operating systems.

But that's the price we pay for providing preodcut for the I-Just-Want-To-Know-Which-Button-To-Push crowd.

"SUNNYVALE_PLASTICVALE" wrote

--------------------

WINDOWS for DUMMIES (WIN95)

WINDOWS 98 for DUMMIES

?ViewItem&item=2765007849&category=51092 WINDOWS 98 for DUMMIES: Quick Reference

WINDOWS Me for DUMMIES

[ Snip ]

Back in Win95 days I wrote a little DOS program that just ran some nested loops. The output was the time it took to run the loops. I ran the program in a DOS window, then shut down Windows and ran in DOS. The program ran about 8 times faster in DOS.

Just think of the computing power we'd have available today if we didn't have Windows to bog them down.

-- Bill Kaiser snipped-for-privacy@mtholyoke.edu

There are three ways to do a job: good, cheap, and quick. You can have any two. A good, cheap job won't be quick. A good, quick job won't be cheap. A cheap, quick job won't be good.

It wasn't a fair test. The Win95 (et al) DOS emulator interfered with program execution a great deal. You needed to write a Windows native program and set the loop count to about a million to cover the differences in "get time" sequences, and you have to make sure you call the OS in both cases to "get current time." DOS lets you look at the clock directly if you know how.

That said, compute bound loops are not what slows Windows / MacOS, et al down. It is OS calls to perform services. Also, since the advent of really cheap memory and fast processors, programmers seem less concerned with making tight, fast code, even in C or C++. Whatever seems to work is good enough.

When you start, like I did, with a 360/30 with 64KBytes of memory, you learn to write tighter code and every instruction counts.

But if we were all still using DOS or CPM, computer would still be unusable by most real people. (they are only marginally usable now, IMO).

Ed.

in article snipped-for-privacy@nap.mtholyoke.edu, snipped-for-privacy@mtholyoke.edu at snipped-for-privacy@mtholyoke.edu wrote on 11/17/03 7:51 AM:

Gentlemen, Computers could be even less usable. I was making some CAD drawings the other day, and my supervisor and I were talking about Star Trek. We came to the conclusion that CAD using the Star Trek voice commands to do CAD would be awful:

'Computer! Draw a line from the origin to the point (1.500, .093, .093) relative to the origin...'

Imagine doing that all day! Cordially yours, Gerard P.