I turned my computer off last night now I turned it on this morning and there was many problems and changes, I still have all the stuff on my hardrive though.
-I had 70% less desktop icons
-some taskbar icons dissapeared
-Start> and there was hardly anyshortcuts
-It seems to be reinstalling my client security and Norton Antivirus
-The Unicyclist Community did not remember me
-MSN did not remember anyone and it was blank
-Random stuff as if it is trying to remember all the programs on my hardive and its going crazy
When I have turned off my computer before it has never done this…???
Any help appreciated.
Fragmented files take a lot longer for the computer to find and read. You find and run defrag like he said ^.
Another good thing to try is error checking. This is found in tools right above defrag. Select the boxes to fix trouble and select scan. Then when you restart your computer, it will run a disk scan before windows loads.
These things are easy to try, and might fix it, so try the easy stuff first.
It is probably due to something causing Windows to not load your user account. When that happens you end up with user account settings being loaded from the default account and none of your own personal settings. All your files will still be there, so no worries about that. Just your user settings are being set back to default.
It can be recovered.
First thing to try is rebooting. Windows may recover and load your user settings.
If that doesn’t work then you’ll have to do some recovery. Create a new user account and copy the files from the old account to the new account.
Id do a system restore to about 2 days ago, and you should pay attention to waht your downlaoding on the comp. It seems like what you have, never happened cause it enver got a change to run from the bootup, which is how must viruses like to run.
So try the system restore. Go back as far as you want. Youll see what has been downloaded from the past, and if its something suspicious go before that downlaod.
Note that if you have Vista then some of the stuff mentioned in this thread may be different then described in XP. For example, the defrag thing is different in Vista. It defrags on its on in the background by default, and the dialog box is completly different.
With information like that it’s hard to offer advice. Above it said you don’t need to manually defrag if you’re running Vista. But more importantly, John Childs has spoken. When John Childs offers advice in a computer thread, that should be your starting point.
Another thing to note is that leaving your computer running all the time, though it works if you take good care of everything, usually leads to increasingly poor performance and loss of memory. Macs too. It’s a good idea to restart the machine at least once a week to “clear its pipes,” especially if you’re not a real savvy user.
For vanupan: 68.5 gigs was his free space. Windows isn’t quite that big yet, even with the addition of bloatware such as Notepad and MS Paint (which might add up to 100k between the two of them on a bad day). An 80GB hard drive, once formatted, is only going to be like 76GB usable anyway, right?
Specially on a laptop. Desktops are a lot more forgivable, thats why all 4 of mine have been on as close to 24/7 as possable for the years I used each of them. All of them still boot up and run just fine.
Restarting is good though, Like John said. Clearing out cached files and your ram helps out every now and then, depending on what your doing.
You should check your processes, and disable the oens you dont need. Specially the ones that will run at startup. Like, all I need at startup is my sound devices (Realtek Dolby Home theater HD sound manager. The onboard codecs are surprisingly better than AC97, and offer quality close to standard sound cards. Anyways!..), MSN messenger, and Ati catalyst. Everything else just takes up resources. I dont need Nero Express loading on startup. Ill run that when im going to make a cd, thank you very much. lol
That is a very good possibility given the symptoms. Especially if Unisykolist has recently installed any warez/cracks/keygens/porn codecs/or similar.
You can try cleaning up a mess like that, but my recommendation is to copy off all the data files then reinstall Windows from scratch. I don’t trust a cleaned computer. You can’t be sure you got everything. There could still be a keylogger or other evil hiding. The only way to be sure is to reinstall from scratch.
Nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
I write this after spending, so far, half a day trying to get SP3 to install on my virtual machine copy of Windows XP on my Mac. The Windows Update web site has its limitations. Like not being able to figure out how to update my copy of Windows. But it should appear like any normal copy of Windows from the outside…
An 80GB hard drive, once formatted, is only going to be like 76GB usable anyway, right?