Small Rant

My PC is back. A huge thank you goes out to my PC geeks (said ever so lovingly) over at Power PC in Marietta, GA. They are the best at what they do. They are fair, reasonably priced and they won’t scam you by telling you they have to fix something that is not broken. I heart you guys!

Now on to the rant! I don’t know if you remember I was have major problems about 2 months ago. My hard drive was too small for todays programming. I was trying to run my pc on a 16 gig HD and I had unknowingly picked up a virus that had eaten up what little free space I had left… well.. that led to windows crashing. My HD was over 6 years old and on its last legs. (They don’t last forever folks )

I found what I had thought was a great deal on a new HD over at TigerDirect.com and purchased a 40 gig. When it came in I took my pc over to to another friend who managed to recover all my data on the old HD’s very last boot up… it died during the operation. I was thrilled! That thrill was short lived…

My troubles continued to occur with blue screens of death, no video inputs and freezing window panes on the new drive. Painstaking efforts were employed to figure out what the problem was. I scanned for viruses over at housecall. (Trend Micro) One was detected in my registry. I bought a registry cleaner, but the problems continued. This version of windows did not come with Disk Doctor, so I bought one and still the problems continued.

Next I noticed that my PCCillin was not working correctly and when it did, it would freeze or cause my PC to reboot itself. I shut it down and took a chance on Windows Defender to help keep me virus free. It did to a point but even that was clogging my PC’s arteries, so that also had to be shut down. All of these things took place over a period of two months. Some days my PC would not boot up at all. Some days it ran like a champ… some it was just slower than dirt. I found a great tool to help speed up my PC. It is called WinXcellerator. It helped to speed up my PC by freeing up my RAM.

We finally removed PCCillin completely off the computer and suddenly we had a faster computer, but still had the occasional mysterious self reboots, and no video imputs. I was figuring at this point that a virus was still attached to my registry or that my mother board was giving up the ghost as well. I broke down and took it last Thursday to my repair guys and prepared for the worst.

I received a call from them first thing Friday morning. Your HD crashed our system upon boot up. Good news: Your MB is fine, all parts are in great shape. Bad news: Your HD is bad. It has bad sectors and we don’t know if we can get all your data.

Me: “But, but that is impossible! I just bought it less than two months ago and it was new!”

Them: “Nope, your HD is bad and we will do our best to retrieve your data.”

Me: “Sigh, OK.”

It turns out that The “New” HD I bought was apparently refurbished. I am totally never buying anything, ever again, from TigerDirect.com. I am recommending that my friends never buy anything from them either. I was scammed and what truly pisses me off is that it only had a 30 day manufacturer’s warranty and I can do nothing about getting my few and far between extra bucks back. I will never buy anything made by Seagate again either.

My buds over at Power PC put in a new Western Digital 80 gig, managed to recover my data and I am now operating at normal speeds with no blue screens of death. It also turns out that I was correct to uninstall PCCillin. The guys told me that they have had 7 customers bring in their PCs with the same problems: blue screens and freezing PC’s. It was all traced back to PCCillin. It does not work correctly with Windows XP. They also told me that Norton is a resource hog and will slow down windows, but at least it will not crash XP.

I chose to go a different route. I have been using a free but very effective firewall called Zone Alarm. I checked them out and it turns out that they have a complete internet security program that is very affordable. I have been running it now for almost 24 hours and it has not caused the first problem, has caught it’s first trojan virus (myspace is full of them), and it does not slow down my system. It has self learning software that reads what sites you go to often and places them in catagories of safe or not safe. It warns you that it is blocking pop ups and spyware as you surf, so you can learn as well. I am totally pleased with it. You can try it free for 15 days as a trial and it is the complete package. At least you have time to find out if it will cause you problems.

Well, this was not a small rant… but I think I got my point across.

Hope your weekends are truly wonderful!