PC acting strangely

[aspen]

My Dad's 3 year old dell pc has started acting strangely recently and now its bloody useless. It started off a couple of weeks ago when trying to run some applications or open another IE browser would result in nothing happening. Restarting windows got rid of the problem. Now it is doing it all the time, I can't get it to connect to the net, I can't open Norton to run a scan, open applications don't show up on the task bar. My Dad recently downloaded magicdisc and had some trouble with it but eventually managed to uninstall it. Could this be related?

It takes an age to boot and won't even shut down now, it crashes on the 'saving your settings screen' and there are always a few applications that are not responding.

Does anyone have any advice?

[Petros]

First thing I'd do is get rid of Norton. Useless (i m h o )
Get Avast anti virus on there, free of charge and actually works, will stop Trojans.

[Deva Link]

Make a backup of anything he wants to keep. 2-3 yrs is prime HDD failure time.

[mcarrick69]

Back everything up and re-install windows. Run checkdisk first to check the disk is fine. 2-3 years is a long time for an windows installation!

There is also some issue with some optiplex's where the capacitors swell up on the motherboard and cause weird behaviour. Might be worth a quick look.

[aspen]

Thanks for the replies. I tried to reply a while ago but I've just realised it didn't work.

Eventually sorted it out by doing a system restore to a date a few weeks previous. Now its running well again.

[TheLearner]

aspen said:

Thanks for the replies. I tried to reply a while ago but I've just realised it didn't work.

Eventually sorted it out by doing a system restore to a date a few weeks previous. Now its running well again.

It'll go again in short order.

Start syncing data to a disk pack now, that way you only need to move the changed files over. You might limp in to the New Year but a reinstall is on your horizons.

Also, friends don't let friends surf with Internet Explorer, install Firefox/Opera and migrate him to Thunderbird.