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

[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...