Well I have been having a lot of problems for nearly 2 months now and I give up... Computer wins! But I have to keep on chugging... can't afford to get a new one.

I have a Dell machine and its a few years old and has worked from the factory XP install for nearly 4 years. Was a real surprise to say the least. Finally about 6 months ago it was just so bad and running really slow so I reformatted.. no problem ran great for about 2months. Ran into a serious virus that took all my admin rights away and I couldn't get rid of it. Reformatted again and after I installed SP3 of XP I started having strange issues and serious lock ups. SO bad that I just decided to reformat another time and use the 2nd drive on the machine instead of the original HDD to make sure it was not damaged from the virus a few months prior.

Well needless to say its not much better, but at least it still working at the moment. I have installed apps and come back to use them and they are missing. I have install apps and they worked after the install, but when I start them now they fail and when the error messages come up it locks the machine up. Hard boot is required to get out of the problem. Sometimes when I have something running the machine locks up, but if I do an ALT, CRTL, DEL the computer starts working again... I have not clue at what this problem is or how resolve it. Also when i am in the Task manager it will not respond with the mouse or lags really far behind... the machine ran really good until that virus and SP3. Another thing I find odd is all the windows updates do not show up in my add & remove programs... if I recall they usually fill up the menu.

Any suggestions any ideas.... please let me know... I am at my wits end with this machine and like I mentioned above I can't afford to get a new one.

Sorry for being long winded
Thanks,
Scott

There could be other problems besides a virus, like h/w failure or more specifically memory or CPU problems.

There are self-booting CD's like MEMTEST, http://www.memtest.org/, that will check the memory. Since you have a Dell, go to the DELL site and look-up your model in the downloads support section. They have bootable diagnostic tools to run.

Once you do get it back to running correctly, please install AntiVirus and Firewall s/w... it could save you from having to go through this again later.

Irv

I can't find anything about spcs.sys? Are you sure of the name?

I don't think a virus would ask if you wanted to stop it from running?

First, I'd open a command prompt and do a 'CD \' and then a 'DIR SPCS.SYS /S' and see where the file is located? Report back on that and maybe we can figure out what it is attached to, but if in the WINDOWS folder or sub-folder, doubt it?

The other is you might have a h/w problem. More like the hard disk presenting errors and the OS does repeat tries. I could be a bad sector where a specific file, like SPCS.SYS resides possibly? If so, rename the file, and then copy it in the folder it is in and rename it back to the original name, that will 'move' it to a different part of the disk, but if the problem is a bad sector it might not work as the h/w would/could report and error.

I guess I'd also run CHKDSK from the drive properties, tools... see if that reports anything?

Irv S.