Bought Advanced SystemCare 4, and weird problem since

I recently purchased Advanced SystemCare 4 since I liked the free version so much, but I fear it did its job a little *too* well.

I first ran the program on the 9th of may. things seemed fine. I generally run the program about once a week, as I play world of warcraft and it's easier to have a good game experience if I keep things defragged and performing well.

Sometime in the last week I started having a problem. I leave my computer running. I go to sleep, I wake up, I bump my mouse and there it is. But I was awoken by a windows error sound in the night. I thought I was dreaming. I went back to sleep. But that same sound woke me up again and there was a window that said "windows is looking for a solution to the problem..."

Say what? I couldn't find out what problem, though, as I couldn't open any programs. None. If I already had a program open, that was all right. It would still work. But I'd have to restart my machine to get any programs to open. And I'd wait to see if something was acting strangely, but it would only happen when I'd left the computer alone while i was asleep. I wake up, reboot the system, and everything would be fine.

I think that I've got an overzealous setting in Advanced System Care, so my concern is that while i can go back in time to one of the restore points, I'll have the same problem happening again after running ASC again if I don't figure out what caused the problem in the first place. Can anyone give me some advice?

 

Wow. I just got off the phone with a client having exactly the same issue.

In the client's case, I installed ASC 4 about three weeks ago. For the past week, few (if any) programs will open or run, even using the right-click "Run As Administrator" option within an Admin. level account. Not sure what version of Windows you're running; however my client's issue is on a Dell running Win 7 Premium 64-bit; automatic updates turned on.

What makes it even more frustrating is the inability to run the ASC 4 Toolbox Windows Repair Option in an attempt to fix it. ASC 4 will open using the right-click "Run As Administrator" option; however clicking on the toolbox option will not open the repair options.

Since this is a new issue, I advised the client to do a System Restore to May 13 or earlier (this is the last day he's positive everything worked; he did not use the PC on the weekend of May 14/15). He's going to let me know if it worked; I'll keep you posted.

Until then, if anyone else out there has any proven fixes, please post - they would be greatly appreciated.

 

well, isn't that interesting.

I did run the disk check, and it gave me the following report:


Windows Vista
English (Canada)

C:\ Volume Label: Local Disk, File System: NTFS

Advanced SystemCare is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)...
170688 file records processed.
File verification completed.
898 large file records processed.
0 bad file records processed.
0 EA records processed.
44 reparse records processed.
Advanced SystemCare is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 3)...
Index entry argh.lnk in index $I30 of file 16880 is incorrect.
Index entry 00010027.ci in index $I30 of file 46430 is incorrect.
Index entry 00010027.dir in index $I30 of file 46430 is incorrect.
Index entry 00010027.wid in index $I30 of file 46430 is incorrect.
Index entry 00010028.ci in index $I30 of file 46430 is incorrect.
Index entry 00010028.dir in index $I30 of file 46430 is incorrect.
Index entry 00010028.wid in index $I30 of file 46430 is incorrect.
224252 index entries processed.
Index verification completed.
Errors found. Advanced SystemCare cannot continue in read-only mode.

And I wasn't sure exactly what was meant by "cannot continue in read-only mode," so I left it there and recorded the log in case it would prove to be useful later. it did ask me to restart but I decided to hold off in case there was any more information.

I'm running windows Vista 64-bit on a Velocity gaming machine I bought in september 2009. I have User Account control turned off and run as administrator didn't help my problem either, but after a restart everything clicks along.

I Have UAC turned off because I couldn't run Ventrilo with it on, and I am the sole user of this computer so it's not like someone's going to come along and botch something up.

I noticed the same problems at around the same date. I have a restore point for the 13th and the 14th of may. I can restore back to the 13th after I restart and the disk check doesn't do anything useful.

 

The disk checking feature of AWC 4 is interesting - I've used it on about 6 macines; it seems to catch indexing errors that Microsoft's "dskchk" seems to miss. (This being said, I do not think the hard drive error report is a cause/effect issue with the problem we're having of programs not loading. I'm going to add a few notes on ASC's Disk Doctor below; however, again I do not think it's what's causing our current problem.)

If ASC's Disk Doctor shows errors and gives you the "cannot continue in read-only mode", it should flag Windows dskchk to run when you reboot the PC. If it doesn't, you can set dskchk to run on reboot by:

• Clicking on the Windows start icon (bottom left of screen).
• Typing "cmd" in the search box. Be sure to right-click on the "cmd" option and choose "Run As Administrator".
• In the command box, type "chkdsk /f" and hit enter. You'll get a message that chkdsk cannot run until the system is rebooted. Choose "Y" to run it at the next boot.
• Restart the PC and chkdsk (with fixing mode) will run during the reboot.

chkdsk should repair any index issues. Now, rerun ASC 4's Disk Doctor test and see what the results are.

Although others may disagree, I use a "three strikes" test: If I get three failed ASC Disk Doctor tests and notice that chkdsk ends up finding and fixing errors three times in a row, I take it as a red flag showing the hard drive should be replaced.

To validate this theory, two of the PCs that failed my "three strikes" test were having random freeze-up issues in Windows. When I installed a new drive (cloning the data from the old one to the new one) and running Windows repair during the boot afterwards, the freeze-up issues went away and the new hard drive tested no errors in either Disk Doctor or dskchk. In addition, Seagate's RMA dept. accepted this as a valid reason for a warranty exchange. (Of the other 4 drives in my test, two were repaired properly by chkdsk on the first try and two others showed no errors in the first Disk Doctor test.)

As for our original issue of not being able to run programs, I've only heard of this so far from you and my client. The other 4 PCs I've used ASC 4 on (including two of my own) have been running fine so far (knock on wood); all have some variation of Win 7 64-bit installed and have Windows auto updates turned on. All of the PCs I've installed ASC 4 on are using AVG Free as the anti-virus program, so I doubt it's a conflict with AVG.

Sorry for the long-winded post. I'm just trying to give as much info. as possible in hopes others can use it to help us find a solution. If the rollback works for my client (or not); I'll post an update either way. Until then, I'm going to qiut installing ASC v.4 and use only the older version (v.3.8) which never had this issue.

Hopefully we can get this solved soon. Again, if anyone else has had this problem and found a solution, please post it. Hopefully we'll find the solution soon. :banghead