John W. Colby
jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Sun Sep 5 16:41:47 CDT 2004
Jon, If you are behind a router then you are reasonably safe without Zonealarm. Turn it off, and even unload it. Then go in to the affected PC and UNINSTALL ALL of the network stuff. Reboot and allow Windows to find and reinstall the missing stuff. If you can't copy a file from one PC to another then you have issues not specifically related to the internet, but very likely related to the network itself. Swap ports on the router and make sure the problem doesn't move to another PC. Swap cables. Uninstall / reinstall the network stuff. Also do you have two disks on the same machine? If so copy files from one disk to another just to test the speed completely inside the affected machine. With all the virus checking you've done, it certainly doesn't sound like a virus or anything like that. Perhaps a system corruption, registry corruption, hard disk corruption. Hard to say. Run checkdisk. If all fails... CLEAN Reinstall windows. Windows 98 is not the most robust OS in the world. John W. Colby www.ColbyConsulting.com -----Original Message----- From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Jon Tydda Sent: Sunday, September 05, 2004 5:15 PM To: Discussion of Hardware and Software issues Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] Win 98 problem, possible virus? Hmmn, haven't looked at that, good call... afaik it's just tcp/ip on it, but it's worth checking. Only the one network card, a 10/100 netgear I think. I'm using a netgear Broadband router with inbuilt firewall to stop incoming things, and I use zonealarm to stop potential outgoings as well as incomings. The network cable is 50cm long and plugs straight into the router... nothing to interfere with it, no dogs cats or anything else :-P All pc's are in the 192.168.0.x range, and the internet works fine on all the other ones here (1 desktop and 4 laptops). They're not on all the time though, so it isn't that either. I'll bring another cable hom from work tomorrow to check that, and download some updated network card drivers. Yeah, I thought of that, but I've never managed to make them see each other without disabling zonealarm. I suppose I could always unplug the internet connection from the router to do it. I did turn off zonealarm on the affected pc so I could see it from mine last week, but things wouldn't copy across to it. The file copy would get to about 70-80% and drop off. Jon ----- Original Message ----- From: "John W. Colby" <jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com> To: "'Discussion of Hardware and Software issues'" <dba-tech at databaseadvisors.com> Sent: Sunday, September 05, 2004 9:08 PM Subject: RE: [dba-Tech] Win 98 problem, possible virus? Interesting. Its starting to sound like a networking issue. What network protocols do you have loaded? How many adapters? Any useless ones (modem when you don't have a modem etc.). Can you transfer files between PCs at full speed or are they very slow as well? Is it connecting to the router at 10mb instead of 100? Are you using a hub instead of a router? If you don't have a router, GET ONE! It will make the elimination of Zonealarm a lot safer (for troubleshooting) and makes sharing the internet a lot easier. If you don't have a router are you using Internet Connection Sharing? If so, GET A ROUTER. They are cheap and well worth the money. Do you have a damaged network cable, perhaps the cat chewed it shorting wires. Try changing the cable, then connecting the machine directly to the cable/dsl modem. Is it any faster? Do an IPConfig on both machines and see if the two machines are being assigned ip addresses in the same group. Normal for a network behind a router is 192.168.0.x where x=1 for the router and something else for each computer. Things like that. BTW, you can share a CD reader on your machine, map it on the other machine and then use that mapped drive to install most software. John W. Colby www.ColbyConsulting.com -----Original Message----- From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Jon Tydda Sent: Sunday, September 05, 2004 3:28 PM To: Discussion of Hardware and Software issues Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] Win 98 problem, possible virus? yeah, they're all fine John, I removed a lot of things from the startup list, and from the stuff listed in Hijackthis, it all runs a lot smoother now, except the internet. Jon ----- Original Message ----- From: "John W. Colby" <jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com> To: "'Discussion of Hardware and Software issues'" <dba-tech at databaseadvisors.com> Sent: Sunday, September 05, 2004 6:33 PM Subject: RE: [dba-Tech] Win 98 problem, possible virus? Did you check remaining disk space on the system drive? Is the PC hitting the swapfile a lot? Defragged all drives? Looked at things loading in startup? John W. Colby www.ColbyConsulting.com -----Original Message----- From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Jon Tydda Sent: Sunday, September 05, 2004 1:24 PM To: dba-tech Subject: [dba-Tech] Win 98 problem, possible virus? Hi all, got a problem with my dad's pc. It's an old Celeron 333 running Win98se. It's plugged into my broadband connection and has been running at full speed with regularly updated Norman anti-virus on it, and the freebie Zonealarm firewall. The router also has the netgear firewall thing on it. Within the last couple of weeks, he noticed that the internet connection speed has got slower and slower, until now, it takes over 2 hours to download a 1 mb file. This is on a 512mb ADSL connection (my pc upstairs is still fine). This happens whether my pc is turned on or off, and whether or not there are any other pc's on the network. We did have a slight problem in that he hasn't got a CD drive, so I had to find the win98 driver for my memory stick, and now I've managed to get spybot and ad-aware on it and updated them, run the checks and there's no spyware on it any more. I've also run the latest version of McAfee stinger, the one hit virus checker and remover. That came up clean too. However, I had to uninstall both Norman anti-virus and the remnants of McAfee 4.0 which hadn't removed themselves completely. I've run a registry cleaning tool and made the pc a lot faster performance wise, and all the programs still work. The internet is still slow though, preventing me running windows update and an online virus scan. I upgraded the version of Zonealarm on the pc, and now it won't load. I know the file isn't corrupt because it's he same version that I've put on the work laptops that use dial up at home. I copied McAfee 8 from the install cd onto my memory stick - I've installed it from there before, and from a network folder at work - but every time I run the installer it locks the pc up and stays hung, I can't do anything with it... any ideas? I'm stuck now... Jon _______________________________________________ dba-Tech mailing list dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com _______________________________________________ dba-Tech mailing list dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com _______________________________________________ dba-Tech mailing list dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com _______________________________________________ dba-Tech mailing list dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com _______________________________________________ dba-Tech mailing list dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com