Problems with Windows 2000 Professional

[Keith]

My Sony Vaio laptop is playing up! Since Christmas, every
so often I've got an error message about svchost.exe
performing an illegal operation or error when I have been
using the internet or uploading files with dreamweaver. It
never seemed to create any problems so I just carried on.

In this last week I have had problems with it being very
sluggish and sometimes giving me funny messages about word
documents not being able to be registered when I've opened
them. Then when I've tried to copy and paste it won't let
me. Restarting it has usually solved these problems but
today it is just crawling along taking ages to open
anything making it unusable.

When I checked the task manager svchost.exe seems to be
running continuously and the CPU is running at 100%
capacity - which presumably is why it can't open
anything. I've tried ending svchost.exe but it won't let
me and as it's running Windows 2000 Professional it
doesn't have msconfig to stop it running on start up.
It's so slow I can't even get into the Windows Help files
(not even in safe mode). Any suggestions - I've put it
away now as I was in danger of chucking the bloody thing
across the room!! I've moved back onto good old faithful
PC still chugging along on Windows 98SE!

Thanks

Keith

 

[George Hester]

The reason why Windows 98SE is happily chugging along is because that operating system is immune to the balster virus. Windows 2000 is not. You need to clean your laptop of the msblaster virus. If you look in this key in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

and see if there is a call there on the right to msblaster.exe. MSCONFIG looks at this key to determine some of the programs that start at boot.

You cannot stop svchost in Windows 2000. This service is necessary to to be running to use Windows 2000. If you look in task manager again you should see msblaster running or at least some other file that shouldn't be there. For the uninitiated determing this can be difficult. So if you are unsure what should and what shouldn't be running ask us here and we can give you a good idea what the "good" ones are.