Computer Help Required

[Sam]

My suggestion is to see if you can turn off Norton and go with a freeware anti-virus first (such as AVG or Anti-Vir - both available from download.com), then reboot and see if anything breaks.

Also see if you can find out about the programs / processes that run when the PC starts, and try to disable as many of them as possible.

This way you can isolate and narrow down the source of the problem (e.g. sometimes two or more programs running at the same time may conflict).

Also, how much RAM does your laptop have? I think you should only consider running Vista if you have 2GB or more of RAM, Vista is kinda memory hungry.

I hope these suggestions help.

[Tetsuwan Convoy]

Thanks for the help guys.

Yeh its got 2gig of ram and Vista came installed on it.

Is Norton a bit of a crappy anti virus, I figured that it would be better than AVG/Avira coz it costs money. I used to use AVG on my old computer and thought it was ace.

[Fungal Infection]

Just cause you pay for something doesn't mean its a better product. I highly recommend Avast - its free, doesn't hog system resources and has NEVER conflicted with anything I've used.

[Tetsuwan Convoy]

Just cause you pay for something doesn't mean its a better product. I highly recommend Avast - its free, doesn't hog system resources and has NEVER conflicted with anything I've used.

i hear good things about Avast.

Onto another setup problem.

I have Vista Home Premium and have set up a jap keyboard sos I can do kanji etc, but in my windows mail, some of the characters aren't displaying properly. The Interenet explorer sems to do ok, although there is the occasional site that doesn't work. I can read and type emails in Japanese, just some of the names are off.

Beginning to hate Vista a little bit already...

Managed to work it out. All is good now. Just had to change the region seting a little so it assumed that script that wasn't encoeded properly was Japanese and it works fine now! HURRAH!

[sifun]

downgrade to XP!

but on the other note, you probably need to reinstall. Maybe format if you can.

[kup]

Yeah, Vista sucks a lot with not just a restrictive interface but also as a resource whore. It is also much more difficult to do things that are out of the norm of what I standard user may do because you run into problems which are hard to diagnose.

I also recommend an XP downgrade, particularly if you are into High end gaming due to performance increases and more tweaking room.

I am waiting till Windows 7 comes out because it appears to be Vista minus the crap. The extra crap is mainly what kept Vista down because at its core, its not too bad of an OS.

[blackie]

I am waiting till Windows 7 comes out because it appears to be Vista minus the crap. The extra crap is mainly what kept Vista down because at its core, its not too bad of an OS.

i had a quick play on a mates laptop with the beta release and tbqh it is just vista with a new startup screen and maybe a few minimal things missing

ive got an install but like the microsoft norm it wouldnt install :P

XP is the best operating system and will most likely be that for the next 5 years IMO.