Yo will need to get the "Norton Removal Tool" from their site.

Hi guys, sorry for the delay with an update-I bit the bullit and reinstalled vista. I have a little external 120gig hard drive so i dropped all my important stuff on there and re installed. made the mistake of not putting my wifes email on the extrnal drive though.......she was going mental for about an hour! (whoops)

anyway it has cured the prob and you will be pleased to hear that ive also junked norton and gone with AVG which does seem to run without so much of a drain on the cpu's resourses. do i need to install any other malware/adware stuff (lavasoft?) or is that only really required if i encounter more probs? i used to have adaware and periodically scan when i had a minute. is this the best thing to do?

one other problem-I had windows office before the reinstall. its not there now but it is in the 'windows.old' folder. I have tried dragging and dropping the 'windowsoffice' folder into my programs folder then opening it up and finding a file called 'WINWORD' and trying to run that but it says 'the operating system is not currently configured to run this application' is there something else i should be doing to get this to work?

thanks in advance

Andy,
Be sure to download Mozilla FireFox and use that as your browser...

You have to reinstall Office. You cannot copy it to another drive and back again. All the files will not be there. Hopefully you have it on a disc.

Formatting is generally a drastic move but what is done is done.

Use Adaware once a week or so. Remember to update.
Run Spybot at the same rate.

Windows Defender is on Vista but I don't know how effective it really is.

Firefox with 'fasterfox' add-on installed set to Turbo.

randy,

i don't have a copy of windows office. it was on the computer when i bought it but there was no backup disk. do i have to go and buy it now?

also, whats firefox all about? is it that much better than ie? what are the benefits? is it faster?

Yep fixed for now, just wait a few months and you will have some other problem... then wipe it clean, and re-install everything, and wow fixed again.

Now imagine if every few months you had to do a full engine rebuild on your Porsche just to keep the thing driving like normal ... amazing what people are willing to put up with when using computers!

Best tip for Windows to make your machine run faster is simply increase the amount of memory you have. Second best tip is to run your windows machine with 3 hard drives instead of one. Keep Windows installed on one drive, your applications installed on another, and all your data on the third.

For those interested in the WHY, here is my best attempt at translating nerd speak into english,

In any of these cases what you are really doing is simply speeding up disk access. Adding memory allows Windows to keep more of the hard disk data cached in memory, and splitting windows/programs/data on three drives allows Windows to do up to three times the hard drive accesses at a given time.

See while hard drives are amazingly fast at reading in a straight line, they can only skip around about 60-100 times per second. Applications like Photoshop take forever to load simply because they need to access perhaps 1000-3000 places on disk to gather all the data to startup. In other words if you have to seek to 2000 places on disk to get your data, and you can only do 100 seeks per second, its going to take 20 seconds regardless of how fast your processor is.

Of course the second time you load your application it will probably load faster because Windows keeps previous reads from the hard drive cached in memory.

Andy,
I like Firefox better than IE. On my machines it loads faster. Lots of folks still use IE with good results. I like the add-ons. Do a search and you will find a site full of them. They set up little icons on you browser page to do a bunch of cool things. Too many to list.

If you want Office back you need the disc. Depending on what you need Office for, try Openoffice.org 2.3. Openoffice is freeware that creates and reads compatible Office Word and Excel files - among other things. Great unless you specifically need MS Office.

+1 on Openoffice.

Uninstall all anti-virus and just be careful on what you open and click on. I haven't used anti-virus since, oh 1996, and I've never had a virus.

Tim,
Great tip about the 3 drives - I never thought about it that way. I have 3 drives in my system right now. Time for some remodeling.

I have 2 Sata drives and 1 ide drive. Which would you put where? The 2 sata drives are brand new Seagate 320's running at 150MB/sec due to an older board and the ide is an older Seagate 80. All three are 7200rpm.

I only have 2 sata connections.

Since no one else said it...

Send the hater back and get a Mac, Unix derived OS with a pretty GUI that quits apps when you tell it to, and never crashes.

If you must run Windoz apps, boot to Windows (Bootcamp) or use Parallels or VMWare Fusion, best of all worlds.

There, I said it (Isn't Jobs just dreamy...) :D

took the risk of torrenting a copy of office12, scanned it for viruses/threats using avg/adawre and installed it. I figured that if it screws things up ill just reinstall again and go buy it. anyway it worked fine, other than the fact that it sort of installs every time.....anyway this will do till i can get a gen office 12 disk. tryed opera to see what another os was like. it seemed fast but so does ie now my system is straight. didnt like the idea of having to learn another os either to be totally honest.

Anyway, Thanks very much everyone for helping me out, its much appreciated

Dont take off AVG
- its a great virus checker and does not clog up cpu cycles like Norton.

It found and killed two trojan horse infections on my machine in the last 2 months - so DONT take it off! :eek: