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I posted this as a response to the "Karma" topic, but figured it deserved it's own post.
I am on my third laptop this month from work. My original one never gave me a problem until recently, when it starting slowing down horribly. Got to the point where I couldn't open up any documents (Word, Excel, etc.) embedded in an e-mail. I sent it back to be "restaged" (removing my data and placing it on another workstation). They did this but apparently moved over whatever was causing the problems because it started slowing down immediately. We then had a update to our VPN access last Friday, and when I tried to apply it my replacement laptop wouldn't accept it - and stripped off my old access. I had to use dial-up for a few days - boy do I feel sorry for you guys stuck with that as your only means of going to the internet! So they send me a third one, and I still have the second one here. The third one had the new VPN software loaded, but won't accept my data from the second one. So now I need to send them both in!
Worse yet, one of these units encrypted a bunch of my files. I suspect it was the second one. Even worse, it also encrypted a ton of my files on my personal data storage device (external hard drive). I am in the process of typing this note on the third one while "decrypting" files and folders on the second one. I have ALL of my personal stuff on that external drive - family photos, tax records - and all my firearms records. I figure at the rate it is going, I'm going to be up all night long.
I'm screwed...big time!
Last edited by Ysabel Kid on Sat Nov 22, 2008 12:54 am, edited 1 time in total.
I feel your pain. Nancy has "the gift". She, just by her touch kills electronics. She knows how to use them, she's in the 'puter all day with work in the IT business, they just melt in her presence. I recently got her to switch to a Mac, to see if that helped, nope. Just got her a new Dell last week. Our dime. That makes six in two years.
I wish someone would make a computer with two hard drives, one of them relay-uncoupleable with a button push or even two cables you just click together (NOT via software), and then have it so you could periodically copy EVERYTHING onto the backup drive, which would be DIRECTLY USEABLE in that same or another machine at any time.
All you'd have to do is a thorough virus-check after a session, and if everything was ok, put it all on the backup, then un-plug that drive until next back-up.
Unfortunately, all the stupid 'cloning' and 'backup' software I've spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars on FAILS to make me a real plug in and go backup. There's always some fine print, or some reason that it isn't a 'real' backup if you physically uncouple that drive and try to stick it in to another computer or replace your main drive with it and just hit the power switch.
THAT'S why I liked MSDOS better than Windows, even though at the assembly language level the memory paging was weird. Most advantages attributed to "Windows" seem to really just be a function of thousand-fold faster processors and more useage of graphics and the mouse - all things which would have evolved under MSDOS given time.
It's 2025 - "Cutesy Time is OVER....!" [Dan Bongino]
I'm not sure if this is your problems, but look under Taskmaster (ctr-alt-del) for a program called dllhost.exe. If it is running, then kill it. You may have to kill it a couple times. It eats up all of your CPU time. I have yet to find a way to get rid of it forever. It starts running in the background on my laptop about once a week or so, but I can kill it and everything is fine until the next time it starts up.
kirkwood wrote:I'm not sure if this is your problems, but look under Taskmaster (ctr-alt-del) for a program called dllhost.exe. If it is running, then kill it. You may have to kill it a couple times. It eats up all of your CPU time. I have yet to find a way to get rid of it forever. It starts running in the background on my laptop about once a week or so, but I can kill it and everything is fine until the next time it starts up.
task master is basically how your computer prioritizes how it works. Others here are a lot more fluent in this but it does sound like you could use that to shut down programs that should not be running
good luck my friend. your GSG-5 and goodies shipped today.
Mike Johnson,
"Only those who will risk going too far, can possibly find out how far one can go." T.S. Eliot
kirkwood wrote:I'm not sure if this is your problems, but look under Taskmaster (ctr-alt-del) for a program called dllhost.exe. If it is running, then kill it. You may have to kill it a couple times. It eats up all of your CPU time. I have yet to find a way to get rid of it forever. It starts running in the background on my laptop about once a week or so, but I can kill it and everything is fine until the next time it starts up.
Whar does that program do?
You can google dllhost to find out more. It can act like a memory virus (it really isn't one) and gobble up your memory by allocating it to do only one task involving some dll file that gets loaded up. I'm not sure if this is your problem, but if it is on the running processes list under task master, it might be. I know when it starts on mine, it slows everything to a crawl and I have to manually end it.
I know how you feel. We just lost a hard drive at home and after much work all that was lost was a few emails. I use USB external drives for storage and this is what saved us.
A few comments. I routinely (at least once a year) get my company computers reformatted and all of the software installed for XP Pro. Windows suffers from "OS rot" that it over time slows down due to clutter and drivers. By reformatting it, you get rid of all that junk and start fresh and watch life degrade from there.
This is what I did to our drive at home. Pulled the drive, put in a new one. Started installing software and then in about 5 evenings of work I had it back to working normally again and the data back on the machine. Painful and slow but it works.
To me a true drive clone solution is no solution. All you do is transfer the OS rot from one drive to another. Just start over and you will be better off in the end.
I ended up not going to bed Friday night at all - it did take all night long. This was on top of a crazy work week which had me in Boston, home, then Chicago the same day. And, just to make things really interesting, I was (and still am) fighting a nasty cold. Flying is so much fun when one is stuffed up!
I'm waiting on the laptop to come back. I am pretty religious about backing up my data - I do a complete back-up every Friday. This saved my bacon. I also run a disk clean-up and disk defrag once a month.
Laptops usually have SD & or CF slots. Get a high capacity CF (you can get 133x 8gb for about $30 anymore) and keep your documents on that... particularly on a work-owned machine.
Never keep anything important on the HDD. Never keep anything critical on the HDD. If you even have to leave the laptop somewhere (like a hotel room or checked luggage) pop out the CF and pocket it.
There are some nasty encryptor worms out there, but they only work on your main partition. (I partition my personal drives to a 30gb Windoze partition and a 30gb data partition, then keep critical data on a CF...)
C2N14... because life is not energetic enough. מנא, מנא, תקל, ופרסין Daniel 5:25-28... Got 7.62?
Not Depressed enough yet? Go read National Geographic, July 1976 Gott und Gewehr mit uns!
Peter M. Eick wrote:I know how you feel. We just lost a hard drive at home and after much work all that was lost was a few emails. I use USB external drives for storage and this is what saved us.
A few comments. I routinely (at least once a year) get my company computers reformatted and all of the software installed for XP Pro. Windows suffers from "OS rot" that it over time slows down due to clutter and drivers. By reformatting it, you get rid of all that junk and start fresh and watch life degrade from there.
This is what I did to our drive at home. Pulled the drive, put in a new one. Started installing software and then in about 5 evenings of work I had it back to working normally again and the data back on the machine. Painful and slow but it works.
To me a true drive clone solution is no solution. All you do is transfer the OS rot from one drive to another. Just start over and you will be better off in the end.
[dumb non-tech mode ON ]
Is whatever makes USB drives 'immune' to stuff a fairly reliable thing...?
The problem we have with periodically 'reinstalling' Windows XP is that we're on dialup, and during the two or three WEEKS it takes to do the 'updates' you're out of commission. Plus any software you've installed and setup with your passwords or personal preferences is lost, and has to be re-downloaded and re-updated, right?
[/dumb non-tech mode OFF]
It's 2025 - "Cutesy Time is OVER....!" [Dan Bongino]
Yeah, the update thing over dialup does really suck. However, I think you can order a CD/DVD from Micro$oft that has all servicepacks & updates to M$ software to date on it.
You can keep your Favorites and preferences etc by exporting them to a usb drive and importing them later.
The thing that keeps attached storage generally safe is the reality that most viruses are designed to only mess with stuff in the C: partition.
There are a couple of dongle-specific malwares out there, but they tend to be related to the auto-run feature built into certain brands. I usually low-level format all of that stuff off right away.
C2N14... because life is not energetic enough. מנא, מנא, תקל, ופרסין Daniel 5:25-28... Got 7.62?
Not Depressed enough yet? Go read National Geographic, July 1976 Gott und Gewehr mit uns!
Laptops usually have SD & or CF slots. Get a high capacity CF (you can get 133x 8gb for about $30 anymore) and keep your documents on that... particularly on a work-owned machine.
Never keep anything important on the HDD. Never keep anything critical on the HDD. If you even have to leave the laptop somewhere (like a hotel room or checked luggage) pop out the CF and pocket it.
There are some nasty encryptor worms out there, but they only work on your main partition. (I partition my personal drives to a 30gb Windoze partition and a 30gb data partition, then keep critical data on a CF...)
OI - what is this new language you speak?
Guys, I am barely competent enough to type posts. Everything else with these %#&@ing things is well beyond me! Thanks though for the advice!!!
Laptops usually have SD & or CF slots. Get a high capacity CF (you can get 133x 8gb for about $30 anymore) and keep your documents on that... particularly on a work-owned machine.
Never keep anything important on the HDD. Never keep anything critical on the HDD. If you even have to leave the laptop somewhere (like a hotel room or checked luggage) pop out the CF and pocket it.
There are some nasty encryptor worms out there, but they only work on your main partition. (I partition my personal drives to a 30gb Windoze partition and a 30gb data partition, then keep critical data on a CF...)
OI - what is this new language you speak?
Guys, I am barely competent enough to type posts. Everything else with these %#&@ing things is well beyond me! Thanks though for the advice!!!
It's the language of someone who didn't read your post closely enough. The malware you got infected with sounds like one of those nasty "blackmail worms" that actually does work across partitions/drives. I'm suprised you haven't gotten the email from the blackmailer yet ("We'll send you the decrypter for $xxx").
C2N14... because life is not energetic enough. מנא, מנא, תקל, ופרסין Daniel 5:25-28... Got 7.62?
Not Depressed enough yet? Go read National Geographic, July 1976 Gott und Gewehr mit uns!
Ysabel Kid wrote:I posted this as a response to the "Karma" topic, but figured it deserved it's own post.
I am on my third laptop this month from work. My original one never gave me a problem until recently, when it starting slowing down horribly. Got to the point where I couldn't open up any documents (Word, Excel, etc.) embedded in an e-mail. I sent it back to be "restaged" (removing my data and placing it on another workstation). They did this but apparently moved over whatever was causing the problems because it started slowing down immediately. We then had a update to our VPN access last Friday, and when I tried to apply it my replacement laptop wouldn't accept it - and stripped off my old access. I had to use dial-up for a few days - boy do I feel sorry for you guys stuck with that as your only means of going to the internet! So they send me a third one, and I still have the second one here. The third one had the new VPN software loaded, but won't accept my data from the second one. So now I need to send them both in!
Worse yet, one of these units encrypted a bunch of my files. I suspect it was the second one. Even worse, it also encrypted a ton of my files on my personal data storage device (external hard drive). I am in the process of typing this note on the third one while "decrypting" files and folders on the second one. I have ALL of my personal stuff on that external drive - family photos, tax records - and all my firearms records. I figure at the rate it is going, I'm going to be up all night long.
I'm screwed...big time!
Ya know, people never complained like that in 1985 . . .
Noah
Might as well face it, you're addicted to guns . . .
Noah Zark wrote: ...Ya know, people never complained like that in 1985 . . .
Noah
People running a 'nix variant don't complain about malware either.
Complain about other things, but not malware.
The PC I'm using right now is an old 800mhz laptop running Puppy Linux 4.01... of course, the sound card doesn't work and I'm having other driver issues, but at least it gets on the internet.
Better than my other laptop at Depot right now.
FWIW Dell has a REALLY neat deal on a 2.2lb subnote/"netbook" right now - a 1.2ghz processor, 1gb RAM 32GB Flash, WiFi, etc - with UBUNTU Linux pre-loaded...for less than $600. Neat option if you don't need to use M$ - and even then you can still load Open Office.
And it nearly fits in a large coat pocket.
C2N14... because life is not energetic enough. מנא, מנא, תקל, ופרסין Daniel 5:25-28... Got 7.62?
Not Depressed enough yet? Go read National Geographic, July 1976 Gott und Gewehr mit uns!
Sounds to me you need a good turkey dinner and hang out with the family. Then the day after that the home made turkey noodle soup ,made with left over turkey and good egg noodles, will knock that cold out of you.
I've had problems with my work VPN. Even though I'm suppose to use the east coast server the west coast works for me all the time while east coast isn't consistant at all. So if there is other server options try it. If your trying from home only and are using a router. Try updating the router bios, use the manufacturers website to do this, because I had one that wouldn't let me connect to our VPN but I could surf the internet. But my co- workers had no problems. The router was blocking me only for some reason to hook up to the VPN.
BenT wrote:Sounds to me you need a good turkey dinner and hang out with the family. Then the day after that the home made turkey noodle soup ,made with left over turkey and good egg noodles, will knock that cold out of you.
Don't forget turkey in gravy over toast, and cold turkey sandwiches with mayo! Ahhhh.... I can't wait.
Kind of hard on the disk drive though.
]
Then the day after that the home made turkey noodle soup ,made with left over turkey and good egg noodles, will knock that cold out of you. 