Windows Weirdness

Yep, I was "idle", noticed the temperature climb, called up Task Manager, there was NAV at 100%, problem solved :-) ...Jim Thompson

That's the most likely diagnosis yet. It's entirely plausible and explains just about everything, except for why the symptom seemed to go away when you reset the power settings but that could be explained as coincidence with Norton's scheduling of when it needed to run.

We do tend to forget about the lowly heatsinks and fans but they can and do get clogged, especially with pets around. I've opened systems up to find the interior looking like the insides of a vacuum cleaner bag.

Useful utilities for monitoring temperatures and fan speeds are speedfan and motherboard monitor.

Yep. Just a coincidence to confuse things ;-)

One of these days I want to redo my office with wood flooring... that helps quite a bit.

Of course my oldest son chides me to have rack-mounted PC's inside an filtered air containment, as he does ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Cheers for that, mike. I might just give it a try.

Don't you just love it when they do that?

That's why when a technician tells me he's 'fixed the problem' but can't explain why his fix fixed it I sometimes tell them to put it back the way it was and see if it's 'broke' again.

You'd be surprised how many times it worked again 'unfixed' because the symptom change was simply coincidental or it was something else; like maybe a poorly seated connector/card that was coincidentally 'fixed' in the course of shotgun replacing parts.

Here's a good one for you. A company I used to work for did a radio control system for an off shore well which, of course, had a dead man timer that would automatically shut it in should communication fail. Actually, any failure would shut it in because 'the whole system' had to work for the keep alive to activate.

Well, no sooner was it installed than we start getting "damn thing shut in again" complaints but when techs went out to check there was not one blessed thing wrong with it, and they sat there for days with it working flawlessly.

Customer was some pissed with engineers ripping their hair out till I did an analysis on the trouble reports and, no kidding, every, and I mean every, unscheduled shutdown occurred like clockwork between the hours of 8 and 9 AM on Fridays. Some 'coincidence', eh?

Took a bit of investigating to track down 'why' that time was so special but it turned out the oil company had licensed a 'shared' frequency and their radio was being swamped by a barge doing it's regular Friday morning run up the intercoastal.

It did prove the deadman worked, though ;)

Well, if it's real time mission critical I might agree but that seems a bit obsessive for a home PC.

You can either routinely maintain rack filters or clean the PC but neither is eternally 'care free'.

This may be of interest. I don't know how well it works but I'll try it tonight.

mike

Also, chkdsk is not so great at finding physical errors because it seems to slow down on bad areas but sometimes still gives them a passing grade. So it allows retries.

Only trouble there is that Sun stuff is uncertain while Oracle make themselves a new marketplace.

Vmware offer a freebie too, the vmware server version 1.latest. I found version 2.x difficult to use in comparison. But I've not run a VM for some time.

The MSFT freebie is not so good. Though I do have the WinXP VM installed on Win7 x64 here. It's okay for the odd application that doesn't work on Win7, but clunky feel to it. MSFT acquires these bits of technology but never do seem to get the things quite right when they bring them to market. But, might is right, no?

Grant.

And, a disk needing retries is not a good thing to have, too slow, and about to fail in any case.

Grant.

Yep. BTDT so many times :-)

It _is_ his _home_PC_, BUT he works from home... he's the chief software guru for the largest call center company in the world... sorry about that :-(

Unlikely, given that, by his/her own admission, he/she "doesn't have a plonker".

Have you tried Revo Uninstaller?

G > Most people look at NAV as being a viral infection itself, G > only more difficult to completely remove than most virii.

Have you tried Revo Uninstaller?

Doesn't that have to be installed BEFORE a program is installed on a system?

Does it catch stuff that is installed at a low level?

You install Revo. Run it. Right click on what you want to remove. The program's unistaller does whatever it wants to, then Revo finds the tailings in the registry and empty folders. The pro version is supposed to look for tailings of previously removed programs. I use it to clean up computers, and to remove bad installs like printer drivers.