My computer is really going down the drain and I don't know what to do. For one thing, my computer regularly freezes up when I am running video on media player. It's recently gotten worse to where it will freeze up on other programs with no video. When it freezes, the mouse pointer no longer moves and the computer is unresponsive to Ctrl-Alt-Del. This is very frustrating. Also, whenever I try to long on to a site like my bank, an error message pops up that says: "The connection was refused when attemting to contact ..." I can't figure out what is causing this. Thank you.
1. What OS are using? 2. How old is your PC? 3. When is the last time you re-installed your OS? 4. Have you run Spybot? 5. Is your HD full or close to it? for your connection issue, 1. What browser are you using? 2. Do you have the latest upgrade to that browser? I had a problem like that at work, where I couldnt' connect to my banks website... the networking people had to open up a little more bandwidth so the secure sites could run normally. Has this ever happened before? Are you using broadband?
Might want to check under your msconfig (if you have access to it) to see what might be starting up w/ your PC. Also, might want to check the processes to see what might be running in the background.
1. Windows XP 2. It's about 1 year old 3. Never since I bought it 4. I ran spybot and got rid of the spyware that was on my computer. It did not fix the problem though. 5. I have 8 GB left on my hard drive. That's out of 80 Gb total. Connection I use netscape 7.0 and IE. I downloaded Mozilla and installed but that couldn't connect to any sites at all. For netscape, I get the error message, but IE just goes to a could not load page. Under MSconfig, I've tried to startup with no programs checked as well as with all programs checked. That doesn't seem to make a difference. Earlier I turned off all processes running in the background except for the ones that the computer would not allow. After that, I couldn't get any pages to load on Netscape or IE. I hope that this may clarify the problem. Thank you so much for the help.
Did you install a firewall or turn on the XP firewall? You may have changed the security settings, too, to make some sites not work.
firecat, when was the last time you did a System Restore? If this has happened recently, I would do a System Restore to a date you know to see if that might fix the problem. Otherwise, you might have to re-install XP.
Interesting, XP rarely freeze like that, my best bid is that some program is using up all your cpu and memory space. Next time when it runs slow, try bring up the task manager and see which program is using the most space and try to end it and see what happends.
2 comments 1) Have you installed anything new recently? 2) Do a System Restore to a point before it started acting up(like nwo suggested)...and then see if it continues.
Interesting, XP rarely freeze like that ... not unless your hard drive is freezing, which was a problem I had. You may need a new HDD. Do you happen to know the manufacturer? The IBM Deathstar is notable a bad HDD.
Thanks everyone so much for the help. I was able to get access to sites like my bank by removing my outdated Norton antivirus software. That seemed to be making some problems. It didn't fix the freezing up part, but I think that I can handle that much for now. I am going to try and make more space on my hard drive to see if that helps. I'm just glad that I'm not limited to what I can do on the internet now. Again thanks everyone!
