[Sticks]

Very old posters will remember back in 2002 I was replacing the Packard Bell with Miss Compaq


Well now that computer has been having problems.

It takes a long time to boot up, and during the boot up process it claims the fire wall s not on, so I click that balloon, and most of the time when the XP security centre comes up, it seems to be on.

It takes a while before MSN is ready for me to close.

When I try and start up Firefox it would ordinarily take up to seven minutes sometime for it to come on line and bee usable.

Lately, when I have a virus data base update with Avast, if anyone knows it, the whole PC hangs, with even the clock in the bottom right hand corner freezing.

When the update happens I get a blue box popping up which you are supposed to click for more information and it says in an American accent "Virus database has been updated".

I even experimented with waiting for the update to show, before trying to start firefox, but still the PC hangs and the fans whirr.

All I can do it seems is press the power button and hold to do a hard shutdown and then wait forever to do a reeboot.

A while back, I tried to use the disc clean utility and all that did was reboot the machine which was scary. Defrag reports said I did not need to defrag it, and I get scared of using that now anyway.

My understanding is that hard shutdowns damage the hard drive, but I do not seem to have any option. Yesterday, I had to mannually get MSN to connect instead of it connecting automaticaly

Even when it is up and running, it runs very slowly.

My PC is dying and it is over 6 years old.

Most of my work now is done on the lap top which I got last year, but I need a desk top for printing and dialing up certain accounts to keep them alive. Having never had a BT line, I could not make use of their broadband packages.

Modern PCs do not seem to have a dial up modem

Help?