My Computer Folder - Slow Loading

[Amanjit]

-=Admins please ignore the delete message, the duplicated topics have been deleted =-

The My Computer folder on my system has, over the last week, started to take over a minute to load. The only folder affected is My Computer- sine then I have also been getting errors when trying to install microsoft live suite, which is annoying because I really need messenger capabilities, not just the webmessenger ones...

To try and resolve the issue, ive updated my drivers, uninstalled my latest install of zone alarm which was done about a week ago, at the same time I uninstaled norton, so I put that copy back on, I've updated my HP printer software as well- I also dont have any mapped drives and have disabled the folder options to not scan for networked folders...

any more ideas? thank you.

[Amanjit]

I have also stopped the windows aquisition service- no luck

[rjfvillarosa]

Besides Norton have you scanned your machine for viruses and malware with any other applications?

[Amanjit]

Yep- AVG, its all clear-looks like im going to have to do a fresh install

[rjfvillarosa]

Are you talking about the build in your signature?
What OS are you using?
Have you added any hardware recently?
Have you tried a system restore back to before this started?

[Amanjit]

No its a laptop, an acer one about a year old, its windows XP Home and no new hardware...they've sent me a free vista upgrade, which happened to fail half way through- last few months ive had to boot from the old xp OS, so I'm going to do a fresh install of vista instead.

[rjfvillarosa]

Originally Posted by Amanjit which happened to fail half way through- last few months ive had to boot from the old xp OS.

Thats sounds like something got messed up, you would probably be better off backing up your files and starting afresh with a clean install.

[Amanjit]

Whats the best way to back up my drives using freeware? -onto an external HDD, any software reccommendations?

[mickzer]

This works:
http://www.karenware.com/powertools/ptreplicator.asp

mickzer.

[glc]

If it's an Acer, have you converted the main partition and the data partition over to NTFS yet? Acers ship FAT32 which is comparatively much easier to corrupt. Just don't convert the recovery partition,that's the small one at the end of the drive.