Ms. Compy Fix-It Needs a Better Compy

Ms. Compy Fix-It here, with another post of computer awareness.

The last few weeks have been stressful indeed, with multiple problems on my work computer creating suspicions that ranged from simple Anti-Virus issues to core hardware malfunctions. I don’t even want to admit the number of hours both my boyfriend and I have logged trying to fix this jerk (no offense compy, I mean no harm). Here is a list of some of the things we did to give you an idea:

• uninstall Windows Defender.  Didn’t seem to help, so just deleted it.
• uninstall McAfee entirely.  No subscription, so would only be good for scans, and I had other programs to do that.
• made sure SpyBot and MalwareBytes didn’t have any resident applications running.  I had Avast, so decided to commit and keep those guys as scanners.  Besides, for some reason, SpyBot’s TeaTimer always used approximately 84,000K of Memory on this computer and I always had to Task Manager End Task it to oblivion.
• checked all video drivers to make sure they were up-to-date.
• uninstalled the video drivers and re-installed them just to make sure.
• uninstalled Avast because at one point it said it wasn’t running, but when I clicked “start program” it didn’t do anything.  Re-installed Avast because frankly it’s worth it.
• tried to use Internet Explorer in case it was a Firefox issue.  Seemed to have the same problems.
• re-formatted.  Twice.
• allocated nearly an entire 10 Gig partition to paging file.

So, the issues were as follows:

• every few seconds, whenever I’m typing, the web browser (both Firefox and Internet Explorer) pauses, like it’s doing right now, and a few seconds later it catches up to what I’ve been typing.
• sometimes when it does this, the whole browser goes non-responsive and a few seconds later usually comes back.
• in other programs, like PowerPoint, certain things would cause the program to do the same thing.  For example, I remember specifically trying to change the colour of one bar in a chart and this happened.  That’s what made us wonder if it was a video driver issue.
• scrolling would often pause the web browser and cause it to go non-responsive.

These may not seem like big issues, but a couple of times the non-responsive didn’t go away and had it not been for auto-recovery and auto-saving, I would have lost a whole heckuva lot of data.  Also, I can’t look when I’m typing or I’ll confuse myself as to what’s been typed (since it crashes and I can’t see what I’m actually typing in real-time).  That wouldn’t matter so much if I were writing posts all the time, or essays, or just typing a lot.  The problem is I’m often doing minor edits in presentations and I’m not sure if the program’s noticed my change or not, and it totally slows down my ability to work.  Also, it’s frustrating as heck.

Anyway, I started typing this because I found a site that claimed to have a solution that I wanted to test out and give kudos to, if it worked.  It did not.  No kudos to give today.  😦  Ms. Compy Fix-It needs your help.

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