Helping a friend...

[fatboyjim]

Hi,

Thanks for helping me build my first PC a few weeks ago, it's all working now and I've networked it with my brother's PC and have enjoyed renaming all of his files to YOU SUCK and going on the internet together.

Although it has been nice being referred to as 'computer genius' in my family, this can also be a bad thing. Some people have started asking for help, I've tried to help them and succeeded so far.


I'm going to see somebody else in a few minutes so I'll report back and tell you what I think (The problem when he described it over the phone stumped me a little)


Apparently, whenever he tries to go on the internet or run a CD ROM his computer hangs or has a program not responding... any ideas??

Like I said, I'll report back in a couple of hours to tell you which programs are not responding and what programs he tries to open when the computer hangs and hopefully we'll be able to help him (I'm not getting paid by the way so I don't want any of you wanting a 60% cut of the profits!)

Thanks,

Jim

[fatboyjim]

Yeah, I'm back...

This computer is definitely NOT a well configured one, either that or is just rubbish. It's a year old and ran quite fast. But I was round there for 30mins and it must have crashed 20 times!!

I managed to get the CD ROM programs working, windows was using the biggest amount of supplemental CD ROM cache available (1238KB) so I set it down to about 278KB (I knew this was what mine is set to). For some reason this worked

All of the CDs now ran great. I realised he had KAK.WORM virus on his computer and removed that totally, but Outlook Express and most of the other applications were still hanging up!

I couldn't fix that (any ideas?) but I've heard of an XYZ virus. Don't know if there is any truth in the virus but I do know there were a few INI files etc going by the name of xyxyxy_e and xyz. He said he didn't know what they were


Thanks again,

Jim

[jmatt]

Try choice 2 .
W95 you have 3 choices . With W98 , if you have IE5.1 or higher & you
still have IE4 installed the following applies . No IE4 only 2 choices .
IE5.5 if over the top of 5.1 , offers 3 choices .

You can install IE5.1 straight over 4 . A big feature with IE5 is that
it can be repaired without uninstalling . Here is how to do it . Open
Control Panel , Add / Remove , click on Microsoft Internet Explorer ,
then click on add / remove down the bottom . This opens a window with
3 choices .

Choice 1. Add , insert your IE5 install program & you can find other
items you may not have installed 1st time .

Choice 2. Repair , fixes problems that may crop up with IE5 / Outlook

Choice 3. If unfixable , removes IE5 & goes back to IE4 , now if you
want to you can reinstall IE5 or a later version or another browser
altogether .

[glc]

jmatt: What on earth are you talking about?

jim: Run a freshly updated virus scanner on the machine. You can download an excellent free one from http://antivirus.cai.com . It's called InoculateIT PE. You might also want to get The Cleaner from http://www.moosoft.com and check for Trojans that the virus scanner won't pick up.

[fatboyjim]

Thanks glc, that guy really confused me!!

Have you heard anything about the XYZ virus, or are all of those files safe??

Thanks for the link to those virus checkers, I directed him to another great one, AVG FREE Edition from http://www.grisoft.com

I use this alongside the ZoneAlarm firewall, both products are FREE and great

Thanks again,

Jim

PS. I know windows crashes a lot, but about 20 times in 30 minutes seems like a hell of a lot to me! (Any ideas/Any known Win98SE Crashing problems?)

[Edited by fatboyjim on 03-18-2001 at 03:35 PM]