Well, as you may know, for those of you on SAX, that my laptop has been having a lot of problems. Here is my knowledge of what happened
-Windows booting works fine, no problems there
-Account appears normally
-After logging into account, it take anywhere from 15-30 minutes for it to lead after that (you know, for my desktop and such to appear)
-After it FINALLY loads, everything is extremely slow, internet and programs and etc
-One observation, it seems there is a 0kb file in my downloads folder called "hl.exe" and while it may go into the recycling bin, when emptying the recycle bin, it just goes back to my download folder
so far Avast has been very unhelpful. What do you all think I should do? (if nothing works then I will backup and resote, but that is a last resort :/)
Have you tried logging in with the admin account?
I AM the admin account
HL is a popular abbreviation for Half Life, have you downloaded Half Life from Steam?
I typically don't trust sites that can't spell properly and try to sell me stuff:
Quote:
hl.exe may disgust themselves in your Windows 7 folders such as c:\windows or c:\windows\system32 as malware/trojan/spyware. Therefore, we highly recommend PC Repair Doctor to check your hl.exe process and Windows 7 registries.
Yeah, I was looking more at that site and started getting other opinions.
Well I installed steam, but I do not remember downloading Half-life O-o
as I said, it is 0kb and it refuses to be deleted...
Try deleting it from cmd.exe
Nope, it still comes back to haunt me O-o
1) Install Avast!
2) Schedule a boot time scan
3) Reboot
Corrupted files generally can't be deleted. Programs that try to bypass account restrictions or delete files that are still hooked to active processes probably aren't going to remove a corrupted file. You probably have to reformat the device in question.
The slow-down would seem to be an overload of system resources. You may simply have too many programs running. (or spyware / viruses eating away at system resources)
Really, your best bet is to reformat.
And then you should start over with something awesome. Like FailBuntu (As Nikky so lovingly calls it).
Zera has a good point, although if you work hard at the fix, you can generally get the computer back to at least some semblance of order.
KermMartian wrote:
1) Install Avast!
2) Schedule a boot time scan
3) Reboot
As I said, Avast did diddly (a la Ned Flanders) 
tanner, I would.. but nah, I like windows and want to stick to it. Zera, yep, I guess I better not continue trying
now, I STILL need to know what the possble virus is Hopefully Microsoft Live Security can work for me. Wish me luck!
KermMartian wrote:
Zera has a good point, although if you work hard at the fix, you can generally get the computer back to at least some semblance of order.
Don't ignore Zera's post. Also, under the Start Menu should be a folder called "Start Up" (I'm thinking XP here, I haven't used anything higher than that) that lists every program that starts on login. Those can generally hang your computer during login. I know my XP Partition hung and OS X takes a bit longer to initialize due to Steam auto-starting.
Wait, are you all saying it is possible that this one corrupt file is causing all my problems then?
No, just saying that's likely why it won't delete.
Well, I tried again with cmd, and it seems to have gone now (I have no idea why)... hopefully it will not return, I cannot wait until this Security scan is done with
