Simmon wrote:Yesterday I was doing a school paper on Microsoft Word. I finished and tried running a spell check, but my computer told me that it cannot do the check, as Microsoft Word cannot find a .dll file. I immediatly ran a disk check, a virus scan etc. Then, finding nothing I rebooted (my secret weapon; more on that later). It now works perfectly.
I have a lousy machine, probably pentium 2, REALLY crappy prossesor , and 800 MB free space. My graphics card sucks, it rejected many games, Generals among these. I'm running Windows XP and I have many programs that need tons of resources (civilization 3, 3d max, etc). Sometimes I just get a message that "windows explorer encountered a problem and needs to close" and my system dies. I have two CD drives, and one regularly comes offline- my system does not even know it exists. All in all, a crappy, outdated machine. Sometimes 3 reboots in a row help. :evil:
So, is my Word problem due to virus etc, or is it just my system dying of overload?
Probably the latter. It depends on how much RAM your system has, but I'm willing to bet you don't have a whole lot of it, so Windows has to repeatedly hit the hard-drive to swap data in and out of virtual memory. The problem being that you barely have any space left on your hard drive, so everything is competing for vanishingly small resources, a lot of toes are being trod upon and the system, as a whole, becomes slow and highly unstable.
The interim solution is more RAM and a bigger hard drive, though . . . failing that, you ought to try freeing up as much space as possible by removing some of those games and such that you don't really play With the instability of your system, you might want to scrub and reinstall Windows, as your system configuration seems optimized for corrupting system files.
