Picked up a backdoor Tidserve l!inf and it basically shut me down
several days after seeing it pop up in a warning box on my pc ~ also
got the alert from my ISP..Blue screen and no way around it...Took it
to the shop, they tried several options to no avail, wiped the hard
drive clean and reinstalled WinXP Home, lost all of my programs but I
guess I could look for the discs, really don't need them I guess ~
reinstalled a few essentials...Old Dell 2350 and its been good for me
just pretty much surfing the net, nothing more really other than
that...Upped the 256 Ram to 1Gig and my speed was superb prior to the
crash...Now it sucks, and the hard drive is "noisy" where before it
was pretty much ultra quiet...
Switched over from Qwest to Comcast and wondering if that might also
be an issue...?...Changed over, now infected, odd...?...Still curious
as to why I'm not even close to as fast as I was before (256K to 1G
was ultra fast, seems I'm now slower than 256 at times)...Now using
IE8 which I really dislike, always used "The Butterfly" one prior but
lost that as its considered premium service...
I'm a real novice and wondering if someone can give me some basic non
technical easy to understand direction as to what I might be able to
do (or try) to rectify a few issues I'm having that might make for a
more enjoyable internet experience (besides buying a new tower lol)...
Thanks in advance
As a novice, do you know whether the computer you got
back, has the same hardware as when it was taken to the shop ?
If the drive had been swapped out, and another one installed,
that would account for the noise. Some brands are noisier than
others. Maybe when they "reinstalled" your OS for you, it
was on its own drive or something ? What did they do with your
data files and email ? Were those all wiped out ?
(Note - this is why owning a backup drive is important. If you
backup regularly on an external USB drive, when a "shop" wipes
a drive, you don't lose everything, because you keep your USB
backup drive at home, where they can't get their hands on it.
"Shops" have even been known to wipe drives, when the necessary
computer maintenance doesn't even involve the disk!)
If you use Task Manager (control-alt-delete), you should be
able to verify the RAM in the system. Look at
Performance : Physical Memory : Total
Is the 1GB of RAM still present ?
For testing the hard drive, you can use HDTune.
http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe
The part number of the hard drive, will show in the menu.
The menu can hold multiple disk drive part numbers, and select
one of them. You'd want to verify the capacity of the hard
drive while there. And when you run the benchmark, you should
get a curve. This shows what the general shape of the curve should
look like. If you see a flat line, and a low value like 4-8MB/sec,
the drive could be in PIO Mode. This is a relatively recent drive,
which is why the curve has a relatively high value. I've been
working with an older computer here for a few days, and all
it can do, is 40MB/sec. But that drive also has the same
curve shaped benchmark, and is a healthy drive not in PIO mode.
http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/842/500gb3500418ascomposite.gif
If you open Device Manager, (Start : Run : devmgmt.msc), you
can check for "Yellow Marks". If you spot some, it means
the hardware drivers weren't installed properly.
Based on your description, I'd say they changed something,
but from here, it's pretty hard to guess at what changed.
You'll have to figure this out, using whatever records you've
kept of the contents. Tools like Belarc Advisor are handy
for (partial) hardware inventory. I don't really like any
of the utilities I can find, in terms of "human readable"
information. Everest is good and relatively thorough, but
produces so much info, that it is hardly a way to verify
what has changed. Information overload.
(The three download links are in the upper-center...)
http://majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=4181
These are specs for Dell 2350.
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim2350/specs.htm
Pentium 4 1.8 to 2.5GHz (not worth stealing
)
845GL chipset (drives monitor from I/O plate area...)
3 PCI slots (no AGP for a good graphics card)
Single channel 2x512MB PC2100 DDR266 memory
They're more likely to have "misplaced" something, as the
resale value of old hardware is pretty low.
I've been working on an 845 based system (the one with the
40MB/sec hard drive) the last couple days, so I have some
idea of the performance level. What I noticed, is mine slowed
down when I installed the ATI graphics driver. Mine has an
AGP slot and a Radeon 8500LE video card. It seemed to run faster
without the driver (but leaving the screen at 640x480, without
the driver, would be crazy!). In your case, they would have
installed an 845GL graphics driver from Intel, which wouldn't
be nearly as onerous as the ATI one (ATI one needs .NET for
the control panel).
The slowness could be a function of something they added
to the basic install. It's hard to say from this distance.
You can use CPUZ to display basic info about the processor
and memory. Grab the 32 bit no install version, unzip it,
then double click on the .exe file in there.
http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z/versions-history.html
http://www.cpuid.com/downloads/cpu-z/1.58-32bits-en.zip
It should be able to tell you whether the 1GB of memory is
there, and whether your P4 is running at between 1.8GHz and 2.5GHz.
My machine runs a P4 1.8GHz processor.
OK, you mention "IE8" and that might account for the
perception of slowness. Your computer (like mine),
really isn't built for modern (bloated) software,
and it could be, if you un-installed IE8, things would be
different. An older version of IE, could be less secure,
which is a disadvantage.
Instead of uninstalling IE8, you could try a copy of Firefox,
like one of the older ones, and see if you like that any
better. You could try something like 2.0.0.20 and see if
you like it. 2.0.0.20 is the last version compatible
with Win98, and might use less resources. It would also
have the same security issues, and only a modern (bloated)
version of Firefox would be up to date on security and
maintenance patches. I use this on several older computers,
and it's better than nothing.
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/2.0.0.20/win32/en-US/
Firefox Setup 2.0.0.20.exe 5907 KB
HTH,
Paul
