Greetings All!
I am not sure where to post this thread , so forgive me if this area in incorrect.
I Have a situation that has so far stumped me and is driving me Nuts!
Recently my computer started freezing & Crashing big time, once frozen nothing will
work, CTRL ALT DELETE wont kill anything. The only thing to do is push the reset. If
I wait a few mins before hitting the reset button I will hear a Steady Beep sound
coming from the tower
I have run every spyware program (spybot, malwarebytes, windows Defender etc...)
Trend Micro house call, Hijackthis, CCleaner etc.... in Normal and Safe mode, with
the Network disabled and All come up finding absolutely nothing. Two weeks ago before the Crashing started it did however find a worm called Kolab, which was hidden in the FastStone Image Viewer file of 2 of the
3 House hold PC's, which share the same Wireless Net, But are not networked together.My start list contains ONLY a single item which is a listing for the My HP all in
one. Nothing runs in the background that isn't listed as System Critical with the
exception of Windows Defender. I usualy turn off the HP entries under Processes
running as I dont Scan often But must leave it in the Startup. Otherwise I would have
enable it and reboot if I need to scan Something
What has been happening lately is any browser I use starts to eat up the memory very
quickly, IE, chrome or firefox. They will go from 25,000k up to
800,000 and Higherin a matter of minutes and if i am lucky enough to close them, Most of the times they
continue to rise. This happens if it is one tab or several open, and always
happens when downloading a file. However, the Freezes occur even if the mem usage of
the Browser stay at normal levels. Other times it is the available memory that starts
dropping like a rock while the CPU usage is listed as just a few %. Recently to, the
PC has been Freezing even if the Internet is Unplugged and I am just Typing or
Listening to music etc.. But mostly its with the net Enabled.
After a crash take place a really odd thing happens - Remote desktop becomes enabled?
and 4 to 9 new exceptions appear under the Windows firewall which are simply labeled
"Service". I have Exceptions Disabled and when I go to delete these new ones I get a
message asking confirmation to delete TCP ##### Service. The # are always different
and always 5 digits. The remote Desktop will Re-enable itself even if the puter
does not crash. And also shows up under Exceptions as being Enabled.
The Comp is a P4 2.6 with 1.5GB ram, Running xp sp3
I tested my ram and got errors immediately, so I replaced the chips,and a 12 hour
test! revealed no errors under memtest. However, after bootup is completly finished
and the CPU usage settles down to about 2%. The Available memory is listes as never
more then 1.1GB? And usualy 1.0 or less. I have the Page file set to 2.5GB but have also tried it with
the system managaing it, Either way the available memory limit is always 2/3 or less
of the 1.5GB installed. This is with the Internet enabled or Disabled.
The Hardrive is only 3 months old and XP is totally up to date, I dont know how to
test the motherboard or the Power supply but both seem fine from what I know About
them.
Hijack this list 6 entries after a scan 2 related to Spybot and 3 to the browser
home page / Search and one for the HP all in one which must be in the start up for
it to work. The HP thing pisses me off but I have never been able to figure a work
around so I am living with it
Any info , suggestions or advice would be greatly appreciated. I would like to avoid
buying a new computer and switching to 7 at all costs, However if this is a hardware
and Not a SOftware / Virust type Issue, I would go that route rather then dump $
into a 4 year old PC. This computer and XP have served me well up until this and prior to this, was much
faster and responsive then This vista loaded Laptop I am Writing this on and My
DaughterS Vista Loaded Dual Core PC.
Thanks for the anticpated responces
I can be contacted at snipped-for-privacy@HOTMAIL.COM if additional info from testing is needed.
Though My writing Skills certainly don't hint at it, I am semi Knowledgable with
Computers, and Have kept this machine 100% clean of Spy, Malware, Viruses etc Up
until Know?