Computer Questions (formally Your Desktop)

Seems the most recent problem was a coincidental power grid interruption.

The PC had to do a disc check and there were a couple of errors. Now I have a "ButtonMonitor has stopped working" warning...whatever that is. And now I'm getting corrupt disk warnings.

PC seems to be working okay for the moment.

Apparently there was a power interruption in the area and that seems to reeked some havoc with some of the inner workings of the computer. Hoping that this is the end of it!

The check disk seems to have sorted out the error messages.

Looking at previous and similar problems people have had with Youtube in the past I'll leave it a couple of days to see if it resolves itself. It looks like either there is some sort of malware infection on part of Orange's site (maybe a dodgy advert?) or there's a false-positive hit with the AVG Opera use as part of their protection.

Either way, it looks like someone else needs to sort this one out!

[Edit] using Google Chrome didn't show up any problems at all.

I need to spend some time formatting how my Avira anti-virus scans my computer. Doing a scan now and the elapsed time so far is nearly three and a half hours.

I have a question about "blocking of autorun.inf" warnings from my Avira anti-virus software.

I understand what autorun.inf does and I understand that Avira blocks this automatic run of storage drives such as USBs (but not CDs or DVDs) to protect my PC.

But I am wondering why Avira is coming up with an "Autorun Blocked" warning when I do not have any USB/external drive attached? The warning includes the following information:

"Access to the file "Y:AUTORUN.INF" was blocked"

I don't have anything mapped to "Y" and I am assuming that this drive letter may have been ascribed to a USB, mp3 player, etc I have plugged into the PC at some point.

This happened yesterday for the first time and then again this evening. Between both episodes I did a full system scan using Avira and nothing showed up. Malwarebytes' Anti-malware also showed nothing. I'm pretty sure I don't have anything nasty onboard and I am wondering whether there's a glitch in a recent update from Avira?

Any comments?

Cause many viruses install an autorun.inf on external flash drives / disks etc and infect your computer so most antiviruses are programmed to automatically block such autorun.inf files just in case. Ignore.

These little bastards can be the source of more aggravation.

Trying out IE9 at the moment and I quite like what it has done to the look of this site. Some of the fonts seem to appear different using this browser compared to old IE and Opera: particularly the topic titles.

Rash may be a better phrase than brave perhaps!?

It seemed to be okay for the brief time I used it. What's more of an issue is something like Windows' SP1 for Windows 7. I usually keep up to date with all the updates that Windows puts out in order to plug up their holes and reading around if you keep up to date with those then some people say that you don't need this SP1.

But it's difficult for someone like myself to really know what to do with these sorts of things and I feel that it's always best to take advantage of these updates as they come along since it's difficult to decide which updates to take and which to ignore. Obviously, updates that are not relevant do bloat the OS of a PC.

Since updating yesterday with SP1 firing up the PC does seem to take longer than before so I'm seeing a bit of negative issue with it already. I need to go through what loads during startup - with CCleaner - and google them to see if I can stop anything.

I've got things like the following starting up and I'm wondering if I can actually delete some of the "bloatware"(?) that Dell put on my PC:

"Dell Webcam Central" - WebcamDell2.exe
"DellSupportCenter" - sprtcmd.exe
"Desktop Disk Tool" - RoxioBurnLauncher.exe (I don't even use Roxio)
"Adobe ARM" - AdobeARM.exe
"QuickTime Task" - QTTask.exe
"iTunesHelper" - iTunesHelper.exe
"Adobe Reader Speed Launcher" - Reader_sl.exe
"Quickset" - Quickset.exe (a Dell program)
"SysTrayApp" - sttray64.exe
"SynTPEnh" - SynTPEnh.exe (in a Synaptics folder)
"IgfxTray" - igfxtray.exe
"HotKeysCmds" - hkcmd.exe
"Persistence" - igfxpers.exe
"Dell DataSafe Local Backup" - DSUpdate.exe
"Launcher" - Launcher.exe (in a Dell DataSafe Local Backup folder)
"OpenOffice.org 3.2.lnk" - quickstart.exe

Maybe these may not have any impact on the startup speed when I switch on the desktop, maybe it's the depths of the OS that determine this at this stage in the startup, but when I open my account perhaps disabling some of these could marginally speed up the process?

I don't really want to do a System Restore to before the SP1 was installed as it hasn't broken anything as far as I can gather.

In my opinion:

Alan, everything in that list is obsolete apart from:

Persistence
HotKeysCmds
IgfxTray
SysTrayApp

The rest is useless crap which you can easily get rid of.

After seeing the story about iPhone storing location data it is not surprising to see that Android phones are doing the same.

But, to be honest who cares?

Look at the Western Digital Passport drives.