problem with my T42

[jacque26]

I was getting along fine, but now today I seem to have a problem. Whenever I try to run a program (such as, something simple like the Calculator) the computer seems to hang. It will just hang for about 10 seconds and the hard drive light will stay lit (not blinking). All of a sudden, the program will open and everything will go back to normal.

I thought that maybe since it was the first time I was running the program, it would take longer...but even the second and third time I start the program, it still hangs for that 10 seconds with the hard drive light on (not blinking)

It's quite odd--as soon as the 10 seconds are up, the hard drive light starts blinking, and the program loads as normal. I've never had this problem before and I don' t know what caused it--I haven't installed any new programs or updates or anything.

[makai]

I'm guessing some other process is running in the background sucking up resources.

Do this...
hit Ctrl+alt+del to bring up task manager. Look at the Processes tab.

If you're not running anything at the moment, then your System Idle processes should be at 99%. Everything else should be at 0-2% and fluctuating depending on what your system requirements are.

Next, launch your calc program and watch the task manager usage to see if another procress besides the calc program is using resources while the calc program is launching.

It's possible you have some kind of spyware/malware that is launching along side of exe files, but you won't be able to tell unlesss you check your running processes.

makai

[jacque26]

Thanks so much for your help. This is what I found out.

So, I looked at my processes that were running while I tried to start the Calc program. I noticed that a program called gcasDtServ was also trying to run at the same time, and that this process is one which I initiated in the first place. So I go to msconfig and find out that this process, gcasDtserv, is actually Microsoft's Anti-spyware program running in the background. So, I close it down, and everything runs fine.

Now, I do remember that last week my first version of M$ Anti-spyware expired, so I "upgraded" with their latest download. Looks like that this new version is what was causing all of my programs to hang. Definitely weird.

Now I don't know what do to. I liked having the spyware program running in the background, but since I use Firefox and Spybot I'm probably okay without it running.

[jacque26]

Upon further investigation:

M$ anti-spyware can be running, but the second I turn on the "real-time protection", the system hangs. If the "real-time protection" is turned off, the program can still run, and everything else runs perfectly.

[makai]

Well I'm glad you found out what it was. Luckily it was "anti" spyware instead of spyware!

I am not familiar with how MS Anti spyware operates since I don't use it, but I have heard of it. Maybe the latest version just has some problems.

I personally use Spybot, Ad-aware, SpywareBlaster, Hijackthis and CCleaner to watch over my T41 and my desktop. So far they all do a pretty good job. The good thing is that none of these need to run in real time which means no sucking up resources!

I also use Zonealarm (ver 4.5.594) which is not the latest simply because it's supposedly more stable than the latest versions... also so far so good.

Along with Firefox, and some extentions, things run pretty much stable for me. I rarely ever use IE! Blah!!

I Don't know what you can do about MS Anti spyware real time scanning but I hope you find an answer.

makai