XP IE7 issues

[jamerslong]

Ok, so my wifes PC has alot of issues.. it allways acts up.

IE7 Constantly freezes and my wife refuses to use firefox.
when IE7 freezes, the whole system becomes unresponsive for about 30 seconds all she can do is move the mouse around and curse at it.
on top of that it is also doing other flaky things. and I have no clue what shes doing on them either.
I have her running IE without addons now. thats the best I can think off.

The internet connection from her wireless card drops connection every 30 minutes or so.

earlier today whe was trying to use the shift key to select some photos, it didnt work.

one day she was using photoshop and when she would select something and try to copy it it would cut it instead.

one day her extra fonts managed to dissapear


I am unsure as to how I can go about this, especially since I dont have a copy of XP to do a repair install with.

[beGi]

I am unsure as to how I can go about this, especially since I dont have a copy of XP to do a repair install with.

What about recovery partition?

What happened is really strange, try a virus scan...

[RealBlackStuff]

all she can do is move the mouse around and curse at it

That's why it's called a cursor

When did you last do a clean-up (Use CCleaner from http://www.ccleaner.com/) and defrag?
How old is the mouse? Does it have a ball (attracts dirt) or is it LED?

[jamerslong]

the kb and mouse is a logitech wireless set. it's never caused any problems except the mouse likes to eat batteries.

I defragged it about 6 months ago and it has Avast installed, I have never had it do a deep scan though, it got the Vundo on it a while back and I had to reinstall windows on it, that was back when it was new and there wasnt a fix for it.

I will try running CCcleaner on it and a virus scan tonight.

I think I made a recovery Disc with Avast on it but I am unsure. Either that or I installed a recovery zone on it.
but that would involve me wiping out her computer.

[Marin85]

one day her extra fonts managed to disapear

I could believe the keyboard and the mouse are making you troubles if you didn´t mention that one. Download Process Explorer from sysinternals and post a screenshot. Download HijackThis from TrendMicro and post a screenshot from it. Since you have already had malware once, you could have caught another one due to similar activities Or you have some somehow hardware-related problem like HD going bad...

Marin

[goofyGAguy]

I have her running IE without addons now. thats the best I can think off.

I can think of something much better. Use Opera.

[Marin85]

I guess part of the point here is that it is sometimes very hard to convince one´s better half to change her browser

[goofyGAguy]

I'm not married, so I wouldn't know about these things.

[Marin85]

I'm not married, so I wouldn't know about these things.

Neither am I, I was just kidding

[jamerslong]

Shes stubborn and does not like change...

I just want her to stop whining

[crashnburn]

Change the Icon / Shortcut for Firefox too like like IE. Then make IE look more like Firefox (Skins Themes).

Worse:
Hack / infect / make her believe that IE infected her PC with a virus. Also talk about the new Vulnerability in IE that allows hackers inside.

Access her machine remotely and poof.. She will come around.

PS: Only do this second part if you can do it without getting caught.

Guess what.. eventually her PC will catch some or the other Spyware.. Let her come around.

[Marin85]

Now, seriously, the issues the OP is experiencing with IE are definitely not normal even considering the general fact that IE is buggy. Hence just changing the browser won´t resolve any problems. If it is some kind of malware or even the HD going bad, the problem will still persist and it is really not clear what other implications it may have. If it is some kind of malware slipped through AVAST, you definitely have to get rid of it (for instance, just imagine someone else knowing all your e-mail passwords...). So, I would suggest you to take a look at the two simple steps I posted above, at least to assure that there are no signs of malware activity present on your ThinkPad (hopefully).

Cheers

Marin

[beGi]

...even considering the general fact that IE is buggy. Hence just changing the browser won´t resolve any problems.

I wouldn't say it is buggy, or to rephrase that, it is as buggy as other browsers...

IMO IE does better job than other browser, it is a bit slower and has very limited add-on possibilities, but I really don't remember when IE rendered web-page that looked like cr4p (unlike FF and others, and that is why I have IE plugin installed in FF), and yes, it maybe doesn't look like it should, but it is usable...

Someone might say that IE is more "prone" to vulnerabilities than others, that could be true but other factors must be considered. To be more specific, if you take the fact that IE holds about 70% browser share, from "attacker" perspective it would be more efficient to focus on discovery of IE vulnerabilities than other browser (that have smaller share), and by doing so they increase the chance of positive hit...

Increasing popularity of FF will make it more and more vulnerable (because of the reasons stated above)...

[Marin85]

That was picky Actually, it wasn´t my point to judge the qualities of IE, nor did I say that other browsers are not buggy. In fact, my preferred browser FF is an awful browser and quite often happens to hang, mostly due to add-ons and plugins, but then again what is a browser without those... And even if we assume that every other browser is buggy to the same extent as IE is (or even more than that), then there is still very small chance that all of them would share the same bugs that IE has, so basically changing the browser may indeed resolve some of those issues, provided the latter are entirely related to IE (but I didn´t say that the new browser won´t bring some other problems, did I...). That´s for the picky part and I guess I really went off topic here...

[Mike Blake]

Jamerslong,

Meanwhile, how did you make out with the virus scan and
CCleaning?

The weirdness you listed in addition to IE7's caught my attention.
I was thinking it kind of sounds like the old issue of low system
resources. How much RAM is in it?

You might want to throw all the old troubleshooting stuff at it.
CCleaner will do a lot of that, but you could also do the complete
error-checking and defrag routine (or use CCleaner's excellent sister
product, Defraggler).

You can also try lowering Hardware Acceleration, to see if it
helps. It often used to for this problem.

[mattbiernat]

i was never able to run IE7 on XP without problems. it was always slower and crashed much more often than IE6. my simple solution was to downgrade to IE6, all problems disappear. the same IE7 had no problems in Vista....

[beGi]

i was never able to run IE7 on XP without problems.

My experience is exact opposite, I don't remember any problems with it, even with addons...

I did switch to FF though, but for different reasons (addon support is better)...

[mattbiernat]

+1 for FF on XP. but if you like IE, I would give IE8 a try. I find IE8 to be a huge improvement over IE7 regarding speed and overall stability. and if you are going with FF, make sure to install a preloader for FF, it will make start up almost instant.

[Marin85]

What is a preloader for FF? You mean to put it among windows startup?

Thanks,

Marin