From what I have seen, brand name computer companies don't give you the "or" option anymore. No system OS disks, just what is on the HDD in a separate partition. I've also read that some of the cheaper companies don't even partition the HDD and just stick the OS files in a "special" folder.

Of course, if you are buying a Voodoo or Falcon, it is a different story but if you can afford to buy one of those, you had da*n well better GET the full treatment and have the OS disks included in the documentation binder.

In my case, I Own 3 copies of XP, yes legit, 1st when it came out same day, 2nd with a computer that was sold with 98 on it, and a lap top that was stolen with disks still at home. Worthless to me now.

Oh, current computer is the one ina seperate partition, though it is now on the 6 disks, if I need to replace the hard drive.

wow, the HP system recovery disks actually worked! <shakes Killa's hand> that's got to be some sort of record. Did it restore everything tickety-boo or did it wipe out all your own stuff and just put it back to factory settings?

sadly I too now possess a HP craptop, slow unwieldy clunky piece of mass-produced junk that it is. I've done a bit of tweaking in the o/s because HP's standard install is appalling, no wonder they're so dam slow and everyone just relies on processor power to get over that hump. This being a 2.6 Celeron (yeh i know, look I didn't buy it) that's not an option, so I altered all the prefetching and started running the pagefile in RAM, it's not performing too badly now. I still hate it though, after all, it's not a REAL computer teeny-tiny keys and a silly touchpad, I'm sure a mouse was the ergonomic model for laptops.

needless to say the HP system recovery discs went in the bin, shan't be needing those. Just like HP's support number which I won't be ringing. And all these desktop icons (what the hell is *Network-in-a-box* anyway? pah, wheh I get home I'm repartitioning this and rebuilding the o/s from scratch, get all this OEM nonsense out of it.

"I learned a while back, every time you add a new program that is questionable, "Create" a restore point, and you don't have to go as far back either"

..I told you that, Vulture Boy, but those silly restore discs work by wiping everything and reinstalling silently from scratch. Presumably that's a last resort, we wuz trying to get Killa to the point he could restore without losing anything. However a restore disc is equal to an Esquilax 6-times a week reformat/repartition. Did you know it's been over a year since I reformatted any of my PCs? and even that last time was only because of a hard-drive failure. Since I did the full on tweak of Windows it's been very stable, but I've noticed a lot more stability since I started using proper ram and not cheap generic rubbish. Seeing as I run my entire pagefile in RAM, then that would tend to explain that.



Edited by - Tawakalna on 1/21/2006 10:16:49 AM

svchost.exe is a system process.
It belongs to the Windows Operating System which handles processes executed from DLLs.
This program is important for the stable and secure running of your computer and should not be terminated.

I suggest if you don't have an antivirus program that can scan from the original software install disk such as Norton AntiVirus you ask around and see if any of your friends do because it sounds like a virus is causing the problem.

Oh God, not Norton. A while back when I was relying on Norton to keep my comp safe, I was curious one day and so I DLed the Stopsign scanner. In nearly a year, Norton had only detected one spyware program, however, when I ran Stopsign in five minutes it had thirty-two viruses, and seventy-eight spywares.

However, after I did the system recovery last night, it didn't exactly work like I had hoped. For some odd reason, Freelancer, Firefox, and a useless shortcut to America's Army was on my desktop. (Needless to say, none of those were there when I took the computer out of the box for the first time.)

Other than that, everything in working fine now. Well, fine if you ignore the fact that I can no longer play America's Army or Freelancer online because of my stupid router.

I recommended Norton because it can scan from the installation CD....
10 to 1 says that the Antivirus program you're using can't.

If you're having trouble with your router and you shouldn't be unless you are running a server take a look at http://www.portforward.com/routers.htm
They have most if not all brands of routers listed and an explanation of how to configure them.

@Taw

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Seeing as I run my entire pagefile in RAM

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how do you do this, as i asume Pagefile is the same as virtual mem, which uses space on the hard drive?

tut tut FD you're forgetting the past. remember RAM-drives? well, you can do a similar trick with NT based systems, but only if you have a decent system and (crucially) at least 2gb of fast RAM.

if you have this amount of memory (but dont try this unless you back up first and set a restore point and even then I wont take responsibility) you can disable the advanced pagefile settings in the system applet, so you in effect have No pagefile, then edit the registry paging file executive string to disable state. This forces NT systems to run the paging operations exclusively in RAM and not to the hard-disk - rather like when we used to run apps in ram-drives way back when, because it's faster and more efficient and uses less overall physical resources. The performance gain is truly impressive and actually as significant as upgrading your hardware (and much much cheaper) It's best to do this in combination with a lot of other hardcore performance tweaks in order to get the full benefit, but you'll instantly notice that your hard drive is doing an awful lot less work and you won't see that silly yellow low virtual memory warning anymore. When i get home I'll post a registry guide of how to do it, or you can browse the interweb for it, it's not a state secret by any means. It's made a world of difference to my system and I wouldn't go back willingly.

XP is a good o/s but it's default settings are terribly resource-hungry and by default it's a terrible memory manager. A bit of effort though can bring a pokey system into life, and make those expensive hardware upgrades really worth the money. What's the point of forking out on fast SATA drives if you're slowing them down with unnecessary paging operations if you oodles of RAM sitting around being under-utilised?

good call BP with the portforward.com link, it's one of the most useful sites I know. Ars Technica's pretty dam good as well.



Edited by - Tawakalna on 1/23/2006 5:22:59 AM

I've used one of those restore CD things with my Compaq laptop. However, in my case I had prepared for it all beforehand. It was still quite a bit of work to flatten and reinstall, and I wasn't actually *forced* to do it.

Also, in reinstalling XP fresh there are a number of steps you can take to lock down XP properly, and one of them is having a pre-burned copy of the full Service Pack 2 exe on a CD. In addition, I recommend downloading Autopatcher to a CD as well. Get the Lite version, and then once it's installed THEN enable the firewall on XP, and go to Windows Update and get the rest (or enable automatic updates and let XP do its thing)

Finally, before you go playing on the Interweb :p look at this site. It recommends which services in XP you should have disabled or set to manual. The Service Pack 2 installer makes some changes on its own to secure your system, so follow the directions on the website after putting SP2 on.

An additional note - antivirus programs don't normally do a good job of catching spyware and the reverse is true for things like ad-aware and spybot. Not using Internet Explorer as your main browser is one of the best ways to cut out a potential spyware introducer. When I used IE on my laptop, even if I had it locked down quite well, one or two lil buggers would slip through each month. When I reinstalled Windows on it, I switched to Firefox.

Hope this helps.

Edited by - Hahukum Konn on 1/25/2006 8:07:31 AM

Thanks for trying to help with the router BP, but I followed the instructions exactly and it's still not working. I guess I'll just have to get a new one.