Does this suggest anything to intelligent users?

[james_davis_nicoll]

Three things started happened at about the same time:

1: Suddenly my computer is taking forever to start up.

2: Suddenly VLC is skipping when I play a CD on my computer.

3: Suddenly Firefox is acting like my connection speed is incredibly slow.

Well, and there was a fourth thing too:

4: Suddenly, James made sure all his files are backed up on another machine.

Comments

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

It suggests that you use standard system diagnostics to see if any of the obvious things (bad sectors on your drive, hardware problems, registry conflict, etc...) are causing the problem.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

As soon as I posted, the second two issues stopped. Hrm. This like taking a car to a mechanic to ask about a weird knocking sound, isn't it?

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

Still worth running system diagnostics, and checking what's going in in your startup sequence, and seeing if your registry is clean. Assuming you have a PC.

[tangaroa.livejournal.com]

What are the standard system diagnostics these days? defrag and chkdsk are the old standbys, msconfig and regedit are good for checking the startup sequence, and I am aware of CCleaner for cleaning the registry, AVG for antivirus, and Spybot and Ad-Aware for malware detection. Do you recommend any others?

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

Those are the ones that would come to mind. I'd also recommend against anything that Norton made, just from experience.

[galbinus-caeli.livejournal.com]

Could also be a failure of a cooling fan causing your system to protect itself by running slower.

[wdstarr.livejournal.com]

Indeed, have you (James) looked inside your computer lately? It may be full of cat hair.

[the-blue-fenix.livejournal.com]

Good point. James, no matter what else you do, ALSO crack the case and clean out the cat hair. (You have what, four?) Canned air is your friend. With due use of protection, e.g. a pot holder, between your hand and the about-to-be-cryogenic can.

TBF, trying to avoid an extra Nicoll event.

[rgovrebo.livejournal.com]

If you're running a flavour of Windows, you might want to defrag your hard drive.

[(Anonymous)]

My first instinct is that you've been rooted. Er, that is, you've been infected by some nasty form of malware, not detectable by whatever protection you're using. There are various not-very-reliable ways to check and fix this (you might try Microsoft's Rootkit Detector), but if this is the problem it's probably a nuke-the-site-from-orbit situation.

Assuming you've checked and satisfied yourself that it isn't an infection, a flaky hard drive is the most likely culprit. Galbinus has a good point about the cooling fan too. The fact that it seemed to influence your connection speed suggests a motherboard fault as a another possibility; hard drive errors probably wouldn't cause that combination of symptoms. The VLC and Firefox problems going away simultaneously (if I understood you correctly) supports the idea of an electrical fault that was temporarily fixed by some small jolt to the machine.

Probably not a RAM or CPU fault, because they tend to cause intermittent program crashes rather than slowing things down.

-- Ross Smith

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

Could also be a video card failure pending. I had similar symptoms on my machine, added with funky weird visual stuff just before the card croaked. Since the card's been replaced--no problems.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

The HD is 5 months old so I hope it's not that.

I did get something weird/alarming last night in the way of zone alarm alerts so malware is high on my list now....

[cattitude.livejournal.com]

Well done on #4. Eventually modern environmental pressure will select for humans with the instinctive fight/flight/make backups response.

It sounds like your hard drive may be failing. You should look at the SMART (That's an acronym. No, really.) status of your hard drives. On Linux, you need the smart-monitor suite of tools. I'm not sure of the equivalents in other systems.

There are other possibilities, including viruses.

[brooksmoses]

I'm somewhat in agreement with the symptom implied by Ross Smith's first suggestion, but not its cause -- this sounds like something was eating up all of your processing power for a bit.

In my experience, though, this is rarely caused by malware but instead caused by some auto-update that needed to run its installation program upon reboot. Windows Update does that occasionally, and some other software updates do that as well. The "taking a long time to reboot" and "everything running slow after that" and "suddenly it all goes away" is a key symptom of it being something that runs immediately upon system startup, which is typical of software update things like this.

When you say "suddenly it's taking a long time to reboot", how repeatable is that? How many reboots have taken a long time to happen, and how much time did the computer sit and run between them?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

It's still doing the slow "loading your preferences" thing.

I ran a disk defragment because I had not in a while and after it was done, zonealarm kept reinitializing.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

"protection is up, UI is initializing"

[(Anonymous)]

I ran a disk defragment ... after it was done, zonealarm kept reinitializing.

My suspicion of a disk hardware problem just leaped a tall building at a single bound.

-- Ross Smith

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Arg. Wait, but maybe it's under warranty...

[zxhrue.livejournal.com]

I've had good success in nuking simpler root invasions with malwarebytes.

http://www.malwarebytes.org/

but I'd definitely crack the case and clean the cooling fans too.

[zxhrue.livejournal.com]

oh, and the heat sink over the cpu if there is one...but I think ross smith may be correct and you've got a dying drive.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I backed up files Sunday, too, because I was pulling up one of the games I have to play before I sign off and Spirit jumped on the computer at the same time and it just stopped. Nothing moved. Then it did. It's a 10-year-old computer/drive and I have the Eee to set up when I feel a bit better, so it's not so bad for me.