My Computer hangs but its not a malware problem. Software or hardware?

Hello

My computer will hang in pretty much ANY task. I can be playing spider solitaire and the cards will deal one or two, then freeze, then deal the rest. Or I can load a web page and it will sit there and not load at all; or load partially and not load the ads, links etc; or it might just load fully and completely, though this is rare. It does this on any browser I use - IE 6, maxthon, opera, seamonkey, firefox or Google. I could be typing a message on my hotmail email account and I have typed out 25 words, but what shows up on the page is the first 3 letters of a word and it hangs for a few seconds, then the rest of the sentence appears in rapid order even though I've been done typing for several seconds!
Internet speeds are all over the place (see prior thread for examples). I recently took it to a friends house and plugged it into their internet connection to see if it made a difference. Not really, it still hung severely on most exercises. On my cable connection with Comcast, it is usually significantly slower than it should be. Once in a while though, it works properly and the speed is quite fast. In fact, it recently performed noticeably faster than I ever remember it working and I began to pipe dream that I had actually fixed the problem! lol
Other oddities are programs losing their settings, such as Zonealarm free firewall keeps losing its setting to keep me protected and when I double click the icon in my systray, it tells me that I am not protected and I need to "fix it". I double click and it turns from red to green and says I'm now protected. It might stay in that green protected mode for 20 reboots, or it may change to red/unprotected 5 minutes from when I just turned it green (that is, during the same computer session, without me rebooting). Or Google Chrome suddenly changing the saved tabs on the Tab Page (which I use for my start up page to access my favorite tabs) Suddenly, they were all out of whack and in different orders than I had pinned them in.
System Restore has been all but knocked out. I can not get the calender to go back farther than this month, and it doesn't matter as it only saves restore points one or two days prior to todays current date. I have told it manually to save restore points, but they won't hold on for more than a day or two. I will go back and check and the restore point that USED to be there, has now disappeared. In fact, for a while there, it would not even let me do a system restore to ANY point, even though there were ones listed as saved restore points. Today was the first time I actually got it to run through a restore point and reset (or so it says it restored to that old point! ) That point was only two days in the past and was the only restore point available, even though I had saved others in the recent past (and they had shown as viable restore points in the past, but have now been wiped away).
Every once in a while, chkdsk will run at boot, or even in the middle of using my computer. It never finds anything wrong that I have noticed, nor have I found any particular occurrence that makes it pop up and run. It seems kinda random. It can go weeks or months between running.
So, before I go typing a novel full of unnecessary details here, I will stop and let you ask what things you want to know about! I just ran through a malware check with Tim on the malware forum and it comes up clean other than one thing found by an F-Secure scan, and that is
Suspicious:W32/Malware!Gemini (virus)
C:\PROGRAM FILES\CONFERENCE\CONFERENCE.EXE (Not cleaned & Submitted)

The full thread can be found at:
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=212277&goto=newpost



I regularly defrag my hard drive, have defragged the pagefile and registry; run ccleaner and clear out the junk; just deleted hundreds of old logfiles in the Internet Logs folder and clean the dust out of the interior of my computer on a routine basis. My system is a few weeks shy of 5 years old now. I can't find any obvious hardware problems; system manager shows no problems. Its a privately made system with an Athlon 64 3000+ 1.8GHZ with 2 gig ram, running windows XP home version 2002, service pack 3.


Let me know what information is needed, and thanks for your help!

 

I'm not 100% certain, but I see Panda, Trend Micro, AVG, and Symantec in your Hijackthis log. This are all anti-virus programs, or at least all have an antivirus program under this name.

What is your security and why would you have all of these?:wave:wave

 

usually random and quirky errors and such point to faulty hardware, specifically a hard drive or RAM. What brand of hard drive do you have? have a look here and find the appropriate software and do a long scan of the drive
Drive Utilities

and try memtest for the ram
http://majorgeeks.com/MemTest_d350.html

and yeah, multiple realtime anti virus/spyware programs is not very good to have.

 

Hello

The multiple AV programs show up as I tried all of them in the past, one at a time, to try and find what I thought was a problem with being infected. The ONLY AV I have running in real time on my computer is AVG 9.0. Panda, Trend Micro, etc were scans that I did in the past to see if they might pick up something that others didn't.

I will do the drive scan and memtest. Its been a while, but I had done memtest in the past.


My hardrive is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 ST380013AS 80GB Hard Drive - ST380013AS and I have 29.8 GB of space open


Thanks for the replies!

 

I thougt that might be the case with Panda and Micro, but the symantec I see may be from a previous install of Norton? Run this tool;
http://www.majorgeeks.com/Norton_Removal_Tool_SymNRT_d4749.html

Safe to use even if Norton is gone. I run it on most machines I work on.

That said, I doubt that is the full extent of the problem.

How does it run in safe mode? Better?

Can you post a picture of your startup items found in cCleaner's tools - startup. This should be taken when in normal mode.:wave:wave:wave

 

Hello

Thanks for the reply, been backlogged as its taking so much longer to do anything on this computer. I ran the Norton check, nothing came up. Attached is a shot of my startup. I would like to remove some stuff, but can't find how, short of using msconfig to do it -stuff like soundman, qttask and other non-essentials.
Per thesmokingun I ran memtest for 920% and no errors found. Looked down the list of drive utilities an chose seatools for windows adn ran it. My harddrive failed every test as I recall, which seemed a wee bit odd, so I have been trying some of the other ons to see what they can tell me. Temp runs at 39-41* C and the "health" of the hard drive is 64%. As I vaguely recall, last time I ran a SMART test on my drive (over a year ago?), it was 67 to 72% as a ballpark idea of what I remember its health. Will try more tests as I get a chance here.
Also attached are 2 logs from HHDscan, one on one test, and the other after a "verify" test. Haven't had time to run more tests yet. Would like to get a better shot of my hard drive health. Any recommendations of a good program to do so? Its a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 ST380013AS 80GB Hard Drive

 

Not so odd, considering the problem(s) you are having.

you can try HD tune, but i'm guessing you are going to still get mixed results.
http://majorgeeks.com/HD_Tune_d4130.html

 

Well, after running a bunch of programs testing my system, I still have no idea what is what. Some seem to say theres no problem (they don't list any problems or tell me theres a problem), and other programs won't even run. Some do show some stuff not up to par and I've attached some snapshots of that.



Recommendations? Buy a new hard drive and transfer over everything from the current one? Is this possible - can I move ALL programs AND the operating system, or do I need to have a fresh install of XP on the new drive and then add on all my programs and info I wanted saved? Even if it is possible, is it wise to put the money into a 5 year old system? Its a major pinch to try and buy a new computer right now so it would be nice to go the lowest cost route, but no sense doing a low cost repair if its only going to last a month or two before something else breaks down, though I have no idea of anything else being in bad shape.

 

You do not want to transfer; You want to clone. That way, the new hd will have the same set up windows updates. programs etc. as you are currently using.

Someone did this using a trial program he said he downloaded from MajorGeeks. I can't find the program so I've asked him for the exact link.

It might take a day or two until he responds to my request.

 

just found this. HDClone Free Edition. I've used this program (not the free edition, but a shareware version) and it worked fine. I didn't use it to clone a drive with an operating system on it.

 

Hello

I ended up saving all files and programs I wanted and had a friend do a clean install of windows xp pro. Unfortunately, that didn't help at all, it still hangs the same as before. What would you say is the most likely culprit now (having pretty much "verified" that its not a memory, operating system or malware/virus problem)? Should replacing the hard drive be my next move, or what would be the best idea to try next? Thanks again for the help guys (and gals!)

 

With a clean install and the same problem seems to point to a piece of hardware: motherboard, hard drive, CPU. Unfortunately trying to figure out what part(s) it might be, might not be worth the amount of money and time you will spend trying to solve the problem.