Excessive disk activity-What can I safely disable in startup menu??

[John P]

My mom's computer is always "doing" something / there is something writing to or from disk and she can never run the disk defragmenter. What are the minimum things I need to leave enabled in the startup menu (under the system configuration menu)?? On the same line of questioning, what are the minimum things I need to see running when I hit ctrl-alt-delete for normal operation, games etc.. Keep in mind that McAfee Antivirus is installed and also a HP 4200 scanner.

On my machine I cleaned up my startup programs and I no longer see Rundll32 listed when I hit ctrl-alt-delete (it was there before). Rundll is still there, does Rundll32 need to be there also? I don't see it listed on my other 3 machines??

 

[Mday]

i don't understand the entire gammit of OSes, but rundll32 should be a program that is run, and then terminate.

is microsoft office installed? there is a "feature" called fastfind which should never be used because it is a resource hog, and useless.

press, start, run, and type "msconfig" without the quotes. this will give you a list of programs that run at startup, in the startup tab. what OS is she running? because i don't know if win95 has it.

try disabling mcafee while running anything like degrag.

 

[Rankor]

Under fresh Win9x install, when you Ctrl-Alt-Del, the only things that should be running are Systray and Explorer.

Systray.exe should be there in the msconfig startup tab. Now anything else that is related to McAfee's Virus Scan and the HP Scanner should be checked and enabled. Everything else can be unchecked. If you find that unchecking a certain item (ie. anything related to rundll32.exe, etc.) gives problems, just go back into msconfig and recheck the item.

Mday is right re: Defrag and McAfee. It is recommended that no programs are running in the background (McAfee) while defragging the hdd. Any time a virus scanner checks on an executable (in this case, the executable is the defrag app) that is writing to the hdd, defrag will automatically start over again and this continues.

If all else fails, back up all important files and do a fresh reinstall of the OS.

 

[Howard]

In the worst case, somebody could be accessing her computer. Try installing BlackICE, at http://www.networkice.com/

 

[Special K]

What do you do if the program keeps coming back? I have removed AIM from the startup in msconfig many times but after awhile it will start up with windows again.