My PC is very sick: Malware or something else?

My PC has been quite sick (but not completely dead yet) for the past few weeks. It is archaic: Win ME, PIII-1GHz, 128MB RAM, 40GB with two partitions, -- but it serves my purpose, so I don't really want to upgrade until I absolutely must. Symptoms:

1) Random freezes (even in safe mode): no soft reboot possible.

-- This can happen anytime, quite unpredictably (but I can make it happen almost on demand if I open some pdf file in Acrobat). Otherwise the PC may run for several hours without freezing. Or it may freeze in a few minutes! I don't know what triggers it.

2) To my horror I found that System Restore did not work anymore! I couldn't turn it back on either, until yesterday, -- but all the older restore points are gone!

3) Scan Disk doesn't complete (even in safe mode), -- it either keeps starting over, or freezes before finishing.

4) I've found and deleted a couple of nasties using Spybot. But it didn't help with the above problems. Avast didn't find anything, but it was run with virus definitions a few months old. Updates keep failing because downloads get stuck in the middle for some reason (not because of the freezing problem, yet)!

Do the symptoms sound familiar? I'd much appreciate any help with fixing the problems. Thanks.

 

Hmm sounds like, you possibly may want to look into doing some of the following.

Windows will delete old Restore Points if its running out of space, this may be a cause for restore points dissapearing.

Delete unwanted old files and empty the Recycle bin, just good house keeping.
Check the available free space on your hard drive.

If there is enough Hard Drive free space, try doing a defragmentation to speed up the system, but becareful about this, as you may have an old hard drive and it could be about to fail.

You might also try a scan disk - Re be careful note above.

You might have issues with the seek / access time from the hard drive, becasue the drive is slowing down or getting old check the error logs..but normaly one would expect to get errors displayed with type of fault.

Average "good" life-span of a IDE Hard drive used to be about 3 - 5 years depending on use.
After this no warranties were offered if purchased new - so 1 may potentialy take this time frame as the Hard Drive's performance gaurante before it was expected to wear out, before slowing down and failing.

You may have bad sectors on the drive although you should see some sort of notification or error noted in the error log.

Also try clearing the cache and emptying temp files.
Just incase make sure you back up your email stuff first like favorite websites and especialy the ones you use from the drop down menu as those will go when you clear out your internet cache - previously visited websites. ( this is a good thing to do anyway ).

Try using the excellent CCleaner to clear out temp files etc, its available at this website under free software was it..? or maybe google for it? its relatively safe, esp if you use the default settings.

You may have also had a corrupted Windows update, this may play havoc depending on the update and issue...if thats the case you may want to do what chaslang suggested...

G.luck

 

Find out the make of your hard drive and use the maker's software to test it out. If that passes then run Coretemp to check temperatures and finally run OCCT to test your power supply and everything else. I can't vouch for any of these programs working on ME but it's worth a shot. The hard drive (mechanical) and the power supply(capacitor degradation) would be my choices for possible failure. Let's first see what the results say.

I can understand why you want to keep it as it's good enough for you but it's like an old car now, when does one stop fixing it up? Depending on what's wrong it could cost you $0 to maybe $50 total.

 

Thanks a lot guys for all your help.

necro61:

I'd already covered some of your suggestions. There has always been enough free space (minimum 2GB) for System Restore to work, and I do keep my system clean through regular use of CCleaner.

I don't think I understand what you mean by trying a scan disk. Is it something different from the Windows ScanDisk program?

As I said, ScanDisk stalls for some reason, -- it either keeps starting over, or it freezes when about 80% or so done! But I've noticed that this applies to my C partition only! This morning I was able to complete a thorough scan on the other, D partition. It was able to fix all errors, and reported 0 bad sectors. Is it likely that only one partition is failing? My HD has got about 5 years of light use (a few hours a day).

Where is the error log located? I'm not too familiar with all such files!

I was afraid to try Defrag for the reason you mentioned, especially after ScanDisk kept failing (even in Safe mode).

I don't think I have ever used a Windows update, -- never had major problems to even contemplate it!

--

augiedoggie:

I do know my HD make and model (Samsung). I'll try searching their site for help. But it is so old, I'm not sure I'll find any!

Coretemp and OCCT don't support Win ME :-(. But I'm curious, If core temp were the problem, shouldn't my PC freeze up before too long always? As it is, it does run sometimes for hours without ever freezing up (like it did thankfully allow me to complete a ScanDisk run on the D partition today, running for almost 5 hours)! At other times it just freezes up within minutes.

One reason I'm reluctant to let go of my system is, I'm afraid I might lose use of many of my favorite software (like the complete National Geographic collection, for one). I'd hate to have to pay all over again for things like that that are not updated, just because of an OS change. Is there a way to keep using the CDs? The installation software is not likely to work on a newer OS.

 

XP , Vista, and Windows 7 have a compatabilty mode, for some older programs- but not guaranteed to work on all.
ME was a troublesome operating system, but I did use it at the time, and had to reinstall a couple of times to keep it running cleanly.
Xp might be very slow on 128mb ram- not easy to run with sol little ram.
From what I remember most of those problems seemed to be covered in ME (I do remeber that much) but the hard drive itself, could well be the problem as the others here suggest.
You don't want to replace it, so, my way forward would be --If it was mine, I would get hold of another hard drive, and do a drive copy (IDE Hard drives are reasonable enough) If your old hard drive is a seagate, or, you can get aSeagate hard drive to replace it, you can download the Seagate wizard,and copy your present drive to the replacement completely, even if the replacement is 80gb, or more, as the Seagate tools will work to copy anyway.

 

Update:

I reported earlier that ScanDisk on my C partition either kept starting over, or froze.

So I tried Standard scan in Safe Mode, with automatic fixing of errors turned off. -- ScanDisk kept reporting numerous errors of various kinds:

* Crosslinks. Found that asking ScanDisk to "Give each file a separate copy of the shared cluster(s)" froze ScanDisk everytime! So this was the problem that kept happening earlier, when automatic fixing of errors was ticked! (This was not an issue when I scanned the D parition successfully earlier!

I don't know what this failure points to! Most of the files being temporary internet files or such, I chose to delete most, or asked ScanDisk to keep one and delete the other.

* File/Folder segments stored in "invalid locations" (as indicated in "allocation chains")

* Actual sizes of several files differed from the sizes recorded in their folders! Chose ScanDisk fix.

* "ScanDisk detected 2206 lost clusters in 273 chains". Asked it to convert the lost file fragments into files. It created numerous *.CHK files that I can't read!

Finally ScanDisk finished, reporting "0 bytes in bad sectors".

Now I ran ScanDisk in "Thorough" mode with "Automatic fixing of errors" turned back on. It kept complaining that some writing was happening during its run, and kept starting over and over. But it did finally finish, -- again reporting "0 bytes in bad sectors". But it also reported 61MB of new data written in 273 new files during the run!

---

After all this my PC ran for about 2 hours with no problem. I was happy. But then it froze again, and keeps freezing randomly, as before.

I keep running ScanDisk, manually fixing errors as I see fit. Similar errors keep re-appearing. One persistent one is:

* "The C:\WINDOWS\Internet Logs folder contains incorrect information about tvDebug.log. The size of the file is different from the size recorded in its folder". -- Does this point to some problem?

One new error (not seen before in the scans described above) now keeps appearing all the time:

* "The drive's boot area contains important information that is damaged or invalid". I keep choosing the ScanDisk fix, only for it to reappear with the next crash!

So what seems to be the problem, guys? Is my HDD really dying? Won't there be other clues, report logs, etc.? (I couldn't find any help at the Samsung site for this model). Or are there some other issues?

Thanks again for all your help.

 

I honestly believe your hard drive will fail, anytime now. When it keeps throwing up errors, like this I can only say do a hard drive copy to a replacement drive.
If you have a space to fit another hard drive(spare bay inside) you will only need to connect to the IDE lead, and a power connection, which you can 'make' by disconnecting the cd/dvd rom, and using the leads from that, as you will not need a cd/dvd rom to copy it.
Obviously, make sure the power lead is pulled out if you are opening up the box.
We assume you have the basic knowledge, but , if not, come back, and we can run you through it.
Before doing that download the Seagate tool, or, one of the others listed on majorgeeks- I will come back to you with the links.

 

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...toid=d0f569a45d3ce010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD
xxcopy is another much smaller tool, that will work with any drive.
http://www.majorgeeks.com/XXCOPY_d6544.html