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Microsoft Help clears severe problem. 1

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FredWagner

FredWagner

MIS
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My Gateway (Acer) laptop came with Win7, and has been a joy to use. Last week, something got into it (virus, worm?) that made it unusably slow. Doing a scan with F-prot found nothing. I tried Windows Update, and it failed. Exploring my options in the control panel, I found an option to Troubleshoot Windows Update problems. It let it cook a while, and it finished without failing. Then Tried the Troubleshoot Problems option, and it cooked a while longer, and when it was done, Win 7 was back to normal. I don't know what it did, or how, but it apparently was cured through work by the mothership in Redmond. If it hadn't, I would have been digging into the hosts file, checking the registry, looking for evil DLL's, etc. Interestingly enough, my other PC, a Vista-64 desktop, has not experienced the problem that showed up on my Win7 laptop. Diversity in one's OS's is nice to have!

Fred Wagner

 
Might not be a bad idea to scan with more than one AV - try some antimalware solutions, online scans, etc to be sure. It could be that the virus or whatever messed up that one piece on accident, but didn't mean to (if that's what happened), and sure Windows stuff fixed the updates, but doesn't' mean it rid you of whatever caused the issue.

I'd be really cautious there if you do any online banking in particular, or have any passwords on there. Let's say you access your personal email from there... and your banking accounts are tied to that email... someone could use a keylogger on your machine, grab the password, log into your email acct, use the old "forgot password" link on the bank's site (they could find your bank by searching your email messages most of the time), etc etc..

So I wouldn't just assume that Microsoft took care of EVERYTHING for you.

I'd at least scan with these:
Malwarebytes antimalware
SuperAntiSpyware
Possibly another AV - try Avira Antivir or MS Security Essentials perhaps
An online scanner - such as Trend Micro's HouseCall

Another thought is this - whatever was causing the updates to have a hiccup may also have been what caused your other performance issues. If it was trying to connect... trying... trying... and so on, but never connecting, it could have really chewed up some resources, I'd imagine. And then if the indexer was going haywire on top, yeah, it could bring a system to its knees - doesn't happen all the time, but it does happen.

And I wouldn't consider this a tip for sure. Saying that "the mothership" fixed somethign is far from a tip. Windows 7 in particular does have many more "auto fixers" in place, and that's great, but this is definitely not something that should be considered a "tip". Particularly since you don't know for sure what was wrong to begin with, nor what for sure happened to "fix" it... nor really whether it's fully fixed or not.

Also, may not be bad to run the temp files and registry cleaners from CClenaer.

You can find all the above at I beleive. If not, there are a few others. I normally recommend b/c it has everything, but there has been some questions around that site just this past week or so.
 
Thanks KJV! I am treating the box very gingerly, holding it under a lot of suspicion, will use the tools you suggest. No banking activity at all on this machine. and it acted slugglish again this morning, did a forced shutdown, my wife reports that it has since 'cleared up'. It is very suspicious, still... My work machine, an XP box, took a long time getting its act together this morning, but nothing really unusual, just a good while getting ready to run at normal speed.

Fred Wagner

 
Good point - it's worked very well up until now, but the other night I watched my wife demonstrating something on the laptop (it's primarily mine) and rather than left-clicking on the mouse, she was tapping very hard on the touch pad. Wonder if that has started some hard drive problems....

Fred Wagner

 
Try Safe Mode (Do you have this problem in Safe Mode?).

Advanced startup options (including safe mode)


If you cannot reproduce the problems in Safe Mode see if you can further isolate the cause.

How to troubleshoot a problem by performing a clean boot in Windows Vista or in Windows 7


Try running ChkDsk to check your drive for errors. Right-click your Drive icon/ Properties/ Tools/ Error Checking. Try it first by not checking either box (Read-only mode) to see if it flags any hard drive or file problems. If it does, start by ticking both boxes, in any further rerun.

The hard drive manufacturer will have free diagnostic software that is bootable, or that may even run from within Windows, that will thoroughly check the condition of your hard drive.


How to Use the Memory Diagnostics Tool in Vista or Win 7.



See how many unsigned drivers you have running on your machine. This article will guide you on the instructions but all you have to do is type sigverif in Start Run.

How to identify unsigned drivers using sigverif utility in Windows Vista or Win 7.

How to Generate a System Health Report in Vista and Windows 7
 
linney, thank you for the additional tips! I'll start wringing it out tonight, post my results as things progress.

Fred Wagner

 
CHKDSK found four bad segments, started normally after that. Scheduled another CHKDSK, ran with no errors. Seems OK, but will keep checking regularly.

Fred Wagner

 
Don't leave backing up your valuable data too long in case you are heading for a hard drive failure in the not to distance future.
 
linney - good thought, but fortunately, nothing of huge importance - recreational use for most of the family PCs, really interesting stuff has been emailed, so it's in the Sent folder of yahoo or hotmail accounts. Software can always be reloaded, etc. We do have a NAS box, and significant items are stored on that to begin with. It's not backed up, but it's only powered up when we plan to access it, so it receives relatively light use.
Back in the days of DOS, I used a tape drive to back up, and also did CHKDSK/F and defrag frequently, and even ran SpinRite to keep things tuned up. Since Win2K and XP and Vista and Win7 kind of papered over that aspect of the system, I've gotten out of the habit of regular disk maintenance. Last year I retired a 10 year old ThinkPad that had gotten hugely sluggish, thinking it had a virus or trojan that I couldn't identify. It might have been in need of a CHKDSK like the current laptop. will dust it off, charge it up, and see what a CHKDSK/F does for it! It runs Win2K, so it won't be used much, but it has several ham radio programs for PSK31 on it that use the serial port, so it would be nice to have it available on occasion. The new laptop doesn't have a serial port, just USB and HDMI.

Fred Wagner

 
The built in Defragmentation program is run as a Scheduled Task automatically by default in Vista and Windows 7.
 
The auto-scheduled defrag is an improvement (I have both Vista and Win7 on different machines), but since I don't need to remember to run it, I also have forgotten to run CHKDSK regularly, which I used to access from the same Properties, Tools tab for the drive. Time to restore the habit!

Fred Wagner

 
As disk drives have involved into hundreds of GB's or event TB's, this is what I recommend for running ChkDsk manually.

Try running ChkDsk to check your drive for errors. Right-click your Drive icon/ Properties/ Tools/ Error Checking. Try it first by not checking either box (this will run it in a Read-only mode) to see if it flags any hard drive or file problems. If it does, restart it by ticking both boxes, and rerun it to allow it to attempt to fix any found problems.

Another reason I like to run it it in "read only" mode first (besides saving time) stems from this experience of which I have personally experienced.

Is ChkDsk still a worry when run in Vista?

RE: CHKDSK FILE 9 ERRORS SOLUTION
 
Since CHKDSK worked so well on my Win7 laptop, I thought I'd run it on my work XP Pro SP3 machine. Bad Idea. CHKDSK ran on next boot, then I get a Windows splash screen, then Black screen, no keyboard response. Power cycle, same results whether I let CHKDSK run again or not. Got an XP system disk, managed to get to recovery console, but can't find anything that would appear to affect the disk check. May try FIXMBR and see if that does any good.

Fred Wagner

 
I don't think it was a failing drive, just something odd in Windows Startup sequencing. It's working now - what did work (skipping what didn't) was booting from a Windows install Disk, using Recovery console to FIXBOOT and FIXMBR, then rebooting and using Last Good Configuration. It came up slowly, but it came up, and is back to normal speed. I have copied the files that I would have regretted losing to another machine! This one is due for a replacement with Win7 by the end of the year, so I'll stay with it, carefully.
An interesting utility, CHKDSK -it'll fix what's broke, but sometimes it'll break what's working!

Fred Wagner

 
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