System Slowdown - Need Ideas

[Scott]

Running a dell dimension 8200 P4 512 Meg XP Home Booting
from "f" Zone alarm pro Norton AV. Great system till last
sunday...
d/l google toolbar and installed it. didn't see it
display. put computer into standby for the night.
next morning was hugely slow, couldn't find the second HD
and took forever to boot.
used task manager and found that zone alarm vector
monitor, explorer and msmsgs (which i thought safely and
fully disabled forever) were hogging cpu. uninstalled
google toolbar .. things got a bit better (we're up to a
286 from an 8086) but things were still very slow.
reinstalled xp (upgrade install) an performance improved
somewhat. uninstalled zone alarm afer reinstalling it and
things seem to work much better. the norton icon appears
intermittantly. set the cmos to auto and it found the
missing hd, but xp can't find the file system.
anyone got any ideas/suggestions?
thanks, scott

 

[Malke]

Running a dell dimension 8200 P4 512 Meg XP Home Booting
from "f" Zone alarm pro Norton AV. Great system till last
sunday...
d/l google toolbar and installed it. didn't see it
display. put computer into standby for the night.
next morning was hugely slow, couldn't find the second HD
and took forever to boot.
used task manager and found that zone alarm vector
monitor, explorer and msmsgs (which i thought safely and
fully disabled forever) were hogging cpu. uninstalled
google toolbar .. things got a bit better (we're up to a
286 from an 8086) but things were still very slow.
reinstalled xp (upgrade install) an performance improved
somewhat. uninstalled zone alarm afer reinstalling it and
things seem to work much better. the norton icon appears
intermittantly. set the cmos to auto and it found the
missing hd, but xp can't find the file system.
anyone got any ideas/suggestions?
thanks, scott

It is very unlikely that installing the Google toolbar caused your
problems. It is more likely that using standby is the culprit as some
machines just don't do well when coming out of standby. However, first
try a System Restore to before you installed the Google toolbar. That
should reset the system. If that solves your problems, great. If not,
then I would look to failing hardware as a possibility. Let us know
what happens after a System Restore and if you want more help, we can
go from there.

Cheers,

Malke

 

[scott]

Thanks, but i tried that. system restore said it failed
because it couldn't read the drive that had vanished but
now is found.
i have suspected that HD as a bad actor and had minimal
stuff on it...i guess i can replace it easily with not
much effect, but ...
why is explorer going crazy?
thanks,
scott

 

[Malke]

Thanks, but i tried that. system restore said it failed
because it couldn't read the drive that had vanished but
now is found.
i have suspected that HD as a bad actor and had minimal
stuff on it...i guess i can replace it easily with not
much effect, but ...
why is explorer going crazy?
thanks,
scott

(snip my own stuff)

When a hard drive goes bad, funny things can happen to the data on it.
Download a diagnostic utility from the drive mftr.'s website and test
the drive. If the drive tests bad, replace it.

Good luck,

Malke