h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

My pc just shut down, and I have restored again to an earlier time. After it came back up I got a message from m$ which said I had serious pc problems, uninstall all updates before the fault occurred.

It also said it could be a hardware problem, remember the noise.

What it didn't say was that it could have been a power surge, and I'm really going to be p****d off if it was.

What's this:

detected: riskware Invader Running process: C:\WINDOWS\System32\svchost.exe

svchost is safe in and of itself, but sometimes applications with lesser permissions will try to get it to launch things as system tasks on their behalf.

I dread starting the computer now, but started as normal. Still a feint noise but stops before started, and no wires touching the fan.

I am a member of Europe.eu forum. When I post their is a delay of a few seconds between hitting keys and type appearing.

Is this evidence of a keylogger, it doesn't happen here. Or anywhere else.

That kind of suggests there isn't a keylogger - if there was it would slow down the text appearing on all sites. But even then it would delay the characters by less than a hundredth of a second, so you wouldn't notice it.

What is it then; I get vertical lines eg | ||| |||||||| |ines then I get vertical lines |||

I thought a form was downloaded, then the user does something to it, before it's uploaded on submit.

Their is an odd delay on this site.

What is SATA & RAID, IDE because I got some drivers updates for them.

Why is it a nightmare to install anything, I got a graphics driver and looked up how to install it, unzipped it and it was hundreds of files including an installer.

So I ran that and it took over, changed my background and resolution, does your head in.

Almost every hard drive in use today is of a class known as ATA or "Advanced technology Attachment" - what this means is that the majority of the electronics that used to be part of the computer in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s is now built in to the drive.

They come in two main interface types - "Parallel ATA" (PATA or IDE (Integrated Device Electronics)) and "Serial ATA" (SATA), distinguished by the cabling used to connect them up. Parallel ATA drives use a wide ribbon cable, while Serial ATA uses a small round wire not much thicker than a headphone cable.

RAID ("Redundant Array of Inexpensive Devices") is a means of using hardware or software to make numerous small drives look like one larger, usually faster, one.

So, SATA and IDE are types of drive, while RAID is a way of wiring up drives.

I went on the SIS site because some Firefox Guru suggested I need new drivers, in order to stop the crashes.

I got a list from SIS of what's on my pc and what needs replacing with suggested replacements.

Their was only one graphics driver, but the others IDE and sound have more options; what happens if the wrong IDE driver is installed, will I be able to roll back. For instance if I lose my keyboard and screen I can't do more than than reinstall windows.

In most cases, having the "wrong" IDE driver will just make your machine run more slowly than necessary. The "right" IDE driver will talk to the controller chips directly and enable high-speed DMA transfers; the "wrong" driver will try to talk to the controller, not get the response it expects and "fall back" to generic IDE control commands which will probably involve using processor time when moving large blocks of memory to and from disk, e.g. when Windows writes to the "Paging file".

Thanks a million, I just uncompressed it and it too has an installer. Those instructions about going into hardware are not much use because there are too many files to choose from.

My new graphics driver rung some bells, I've seen the screensaver before, it however can change the appearance of the screen, so I don't know what my web pages look like to other users. But the graphics are now very quick and sharp.

The sound driver is different to what's currently running aswell, I seem to have been running non SIS drivers where SIS were originally installed.

Doesn't appear to be any different with the new IDE driver, but sound driver failed to install, so probably the other one was needed.

It was the right one: I get error -536870397 UpdateDriverForPlugandPlayDevices.

My pc used to be 2.1Ghz, but a cpu speed test put it at 1.3Ghz, is this slow. Or is this test inaccurate, because the fastest machine was a mobile in Estonia, reported 800Mhz but actual speed 8000Mhz.

The reason I ask is because skype says my cpu is too slow for clear service.

What model of CPU do you have?

AMD Duron 1.3Ghz Integrated and advertised in my hanbook to run at 2100Mhz. I'm sure I applied a similar test five years ago and got 2.6Ghz.

I did this test with nothing running, and with everything running and both results were exactly the same.

I reckon 1.3Ghz should be enough anyway, I haven't worked out what it is about this skype thing. So a 25kbs download and upload uses 101% of the cpu time.

I can listen to the radio and watch video, the video comes down at around 800Mbps, and only use 60% of cpu.

My new IDE driver has got a control panel, traffic lights so that I can see it working alright. It reckons my hardrive and CD drive are green for good.

The Duron and Athlon series of CPUs have internal clock multipliers; 1.3GHz is waht you feed into it, and 2.(whatever) GHz is the speed it actually runs at.

Have you considered a faster CPU? If that's a "socket A" Duron (i.e. not soldered into a laptop) you can probably pick up a second-hand Athlon that will directly replace it and be nearly twice as fast for pennies.

Not quite "pennies", but £23.49 for a tested 2400+... Allowing for the faster FSB (you need to check that your motherboard will handle a 266MHz FSB, as Durons only run at 200MHz) and the fact it has twice the cache of a Duron it should perform almost twice as fast as what you're using.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ATHLON-XP-2400-SOCKET-A-462-CPU-AXDA2400DKV3C_W0QQitemZ130240886404QQcmdZViewItem?hash=item130240886404&_trksid=p3286.m14.l1318