Is the forum slow today?

[The Grand Wazoo]

Geoff,
Your PC has problems, and I sympathise with you for that, but you really can't attribute them to AoS. You're obviously not able to sort this yourself, so perhaps you need to get someone to check things out for you, but all of these negative associations to AoS are beginning to be damaging.

[struth]

certainly won't have happened due to browsing a site..
I used to get that occasionally and it was a glitch in the hard drive where the operating system was stored.
that was because I had a new drive installed and the old one cloned in.

nothi g to worry about, especially if your using vista...like I was ...doh......now got win 8 and I love it by the way...

[Marco]

Geoff,
Your PC has problems, and I sympathise with you for that, but you really can't attribute them to AoS. You're obviously not able to sort this yourself, so perhaps you need to get someone to check things out for you, but all of these negative associations to AoS are beginning to be damaging.

Indeed.

Geoff, I also sympathise with your PC problems, but I must ask now that you give it a rest with these reports, as they're not doing anyone any favours, least of all you. It's a lovely sunny day, mate, so I suggest that you switch off your computer for a while and go out and enjoy the nice weather.

Cheers!

Marco.

[walpurgis]

Geoff,
Your PC has problems, and I sympathise with you for that, but you really can't attribute them to AoS. You're obviously not able to sort this yourself, so perhaps you need to get someone to check things out for you, but all of these negative associations to AoS are beginning to be damaging.

Not sure what you're saying Chris.

I attributed nothing to AOS. My PC runs flawlessly as a rule, I just stated what happened. As for "Damaging", that's a bit of a leap. I'm not sure anybody would make such an association.

But, if it pisses you off my saying anything about computers, I'll stop.

(Cor, talk about censorship! mutter, mutter, mutter. )

[MartinT]

How does...

I attributed nothing to AOS

...tally with...

I'm pretty sure the bug that wiped out my O/S came from here

?

Now we know that members here have all manner of computer savviness and we cast no aspersions on anyone, but even if AoS on VB3 had a java-related Trojan - and it was by no means proved that it resided here rather than came from a Google Ad or from a dodgy link - people in the know will tell you that the purpose of a Trojan is not to wipe out an O/S. As Chris said, it is extremely unlikely that anything on AoS was responsible for causing your computer problems and much more likely that your installation was unstable. Just to set the record straight.

[Tim]

Geoff I have gone through this with you previously and I'll try to assist one last time - IMHO (which is based on a little experience) your installation is at fault, be it software conflicts or a hardware problem, I suspect its hardware related, most likely your hard drive if you are getting blue screens, but hard to diagnose remotely. With all that third party rubbish you have running on your computer and a frankly out of date O/S you WILL experience problems, things have moved on and XP is not as stable as it used to be, especially if you install third party software and use the internet. To minimise this and to try and identify your issue I would advise you reinstall XP (if you must) and do a clean install, i.e format your drive during the process, update to SP3 put all recent updates on and install MSE and NOTHING ELSE, no scanner this, checker that, spybot blah, blah, blah. Its rubbish and you don't need it with MSE. I have no idea what you are doing on the net and frankly don't want to, if its dodgy then use a Virtual Machine and VM Player is free, then you can protect your host if you run into problems. Keep a backup of your Virtual Machine elsewhere, then just bin it after whatever you have done and use a fresh one, then you are pretty much bullet proof if you hit a bug on-line.

If you do the above and you still get issues, its more likely hardware related and ageing laptop hard drives are susceptible due to the heat they have to contend with and when they get too hot, they can cause blue screen errors. Check to see what your hard drive temp is whilst running under load, there are lots of apps available, Speccy is a good tool or Active Hard Disk Monitor - Google will find them all for you.

But the best advice I can give you is ditch XP, get a modern O/S and don't use third party 'free' software, its free for a reason . . . .

[AlanS]

people in the know will tell you that the purpose of a Trojan is not to wipe out an O/S.

Err the purpose of a trojan would be whatever its author want it to be. This in no way precludes damaging the O/S.
You may not welcome Geoffs posts but no need to bend things.

[walpurgis]

Martin, I was hoping to say no more,

but quoting a months old post, totally unrelated to today's post about the PC occurrence I experienced today is not really playing the game.

If you're poking through all my old posts, you'll be aware that I have a new OS installation and any bugs that may have been present months ago would be long gone.

Nuff said (on my part anyway).

[MartinT]

Alan - the kinds of malware designed to trash systems died in the dark ages. These days Trojans are highly clever pieces of software written by teams and designed to reward them with a backdoor into the system, usually to recruit the machine into a botnet or to lure the user into paying money to 'unlock' the system.

[Tim]

Err the purpose of a trojan would be whatever its author want it to be. This in no way precludes damaging the O/S.

I would agree Alan, but Trojans are primarily written to either control or harvest information from a remote computer - the net result may be a corrupt O/S, but Trojans are written for gain not pain