06/08: PC Maintenance A Sunday In Purgatory

I've been tied up for the whole day working on technical issues once again, as I was beset with problems with the laptop, Firefox, IE, my connection and all sorts of other wierd and not so wonderful behavior. It seems to have been a bad week for things going wrong, not just for me but for several other blog owners whose feeds I read. If it's not hosting issues it's spam or hacker attacks or spam or a whole list of other annoying things that just eat up way too much time. So, for your reading pleasure, here is the run down of my Sunday in our sunny Caribbean paradise.  

When I woke up this morning my wife informed me that "something is wrong with the computer" which is always a worrying thing to hear as you struggle up from your pillow. "What's up with it?" I mumbled back, reaching for a cigarette and squinting in the sunlight streaming through into our room. "Internet Explorer keeps closing, and Firefox is going really slow........."

Oh boy, as Sam used to say in Quantum Leap

I approached my desk warily and looked hard at the Compaq, which naturally looked like it always does, missing keys and all. Mentally rolling up my sleeves I logged in to see what the hell was the matter now, having spent all day yesterday struggling with coding and redesigning pages, I had just hoped to fire off a quick review and a blog post and go to the beach! Well, it was not to be, there was definitely something amiss and I knew it would be a long trail.

I started with a quick virus and spyware scan to be sure. No problems found - tick one off. Then I ran trusty Registry Mechanic which threw up only minor issues. Tick two off. Then fire up Norton WinDoctor.....make a coffee, results again show nothing major to be wrong. Fix the few issues it found - tick three off. (For a selection of registry cleaners and registry repair options I recommend this place)

I also head over to DLL-Files.com and find an absent .dll in the hope it may turn out to be the miracle cure. Alas it is not, but this doesn't detract from the fact that this site should be in everyone's bookmarks - add DLL-Files.com to your favorites now :-) - tick four off.

Opened up several browsers, FF, IE7, Opera and Netscape. All very slow, Firefox freezing for a minute here and there, IE playing havoc and shutting itself off every few minutes with weird debug messages that mean nothing to me. Unplug wireless router, swig dregs of coffee and reconnect, reboot. Result -zip, nada, nothing. No change - tick five off.

Connection speed is very puzzling, so, head over to PC PitStop just to make sure there's nothing hardware related that I need to worry about. Run scan, and  am told that my laptop is tip top, (as it should be, I look after it like a baby) but that my broadband connection is really slow. To be fair I'd noticed a slight drop in performance over the past week but just put it down to my ISP having a moment.  But today, it's crawling as if I'm on dial up. Well, at least I have something to focus on - tick six off.

By this stage, I'm beginning to think that the Trojan I mentioned in my last post did a lot more damage than I initially thought...hmmm. OK, I go back to the IE problem (I don't use it but my wife is stuck on the blasted thing, so, it needs to be fixed :-) In an attempt to start off with a clean browser, having deleted everything in the cache and run Windows Washer, I uninstall and re-install IE7. That achieves precisely nothing too, so another quick search throws up a few similar issues in some of the forums, but still not exactly what I'm encountering. However it leads me to a "solution" of a sort. I run msconfig and disable a few third party add ons and my problems go away (well, they don't really, it's a bodge, but this is IE after all). Tick seven  off.

I had added a couple of extensions to Firefox yesterday so to eliminate them I uninstall them. Firefox seems to be feeling its old self again, but, like IE, just can't surf at anything approaching a decent speed, and any downloads are creeping along and often stalling or timing out. This is horrible, so it's time to find the solution and I find an excellent connection optimizer at SpeedGuide.net which turned my connection speed supersonic - well, it certainly felt like it anyway. Alternatively, another place I have used in the past is DirFile.com for freeware of all types including connection utilities. Tick  eight off.

It seems that after a reboot and re-installing those Firefox add ons, all is once again rosy in my online garden, at least for now. I get back to doing something hopefully productive. I'm still trying to get my offline blog posting software to work with Nucleus and I waste another fruitless hour with no  result other than getting my IP blocked several times over by my host because of all the invalid log in attempts by Post2Blog, Qumana and ScribeFire, all of which work fine with my Wordpress blogs. (I'm not complaining about the blocks, it's an excellent security feature of my hosting company and is easily cleared from my member's area). If anyone out there has ever got any of these applications to work with NucleusCMS, let me know how you did it please!

So, that was my Sunday. I'm sure a lot of experts would laugh at my diagnostic course of action, but it worked, and I just have to get through the best way I know how. I'm not a sysadmin or trained expert but hopefully readers may find some of this helpful at some time or another. How was your Sunday by comparison?

Now, it's time to curl up in bed with a good woman and a good book. Tick nine off. To sleep, perchance to dream (of anything but computers). Tick ten. off.

TCH

Reliable Hosting Solutions For All

tags: pc maintenance, optimize connection, DLL Files, PC errors, Trojans, Virus Protection, PC problem solving, Firefox Problems, IE7 problems