Possible virus/hdd failing - Not sure. Please help!

[redbone75]

Buddy of mine asked me to look at his laptop. Said it started slowing down. Took a look at it and man, is it ever lagging. Takes a good 3 - 5 minutes just to start up. Once in Windows, continued severely lagging/freezing. No internet browsers would work (Firefox, IE), no virus scan would run (Norton). Couldn't connect to LiveUpdate for Norton and last run virus scan was in September '06! Seemed to me to be apparent viral activity; got same performance in safe mode. I noticed he had some known malware installed, like CoolWWWSearch and MyWebSearch, so took steps to get rid of that. Still same performance. Uninstalled Norton as it was no longer under subscription and installed avast! antivirus, which took some time as the system kept shutting down the installation process. Finally got it to install and ran a boot time scan and the following errors kept showing on the scan, which btw is still going (taking forever!):

0x000003E data error
0xC000009C Status device data error

Looked up the second error code and it seems to be associated with hdd bad sectors, and the first code is popping up in a lot of different programs. Getting lots of "internal program" errors as well. Just want to get some input if anyone has a little time. Thanks!

 

[RebateMonger]

That's what they make hard drive and memory test software for:

Download the hard drive maker's diagnostics program and do a thorough scan of the hard drive.
Similarly, download Memtest86)+ or Microsoft's System Memory tester and scan the memory a couple of times over.

Once you've verified that the basic hardware is good, then you can start looking at software issues, of which there appear to be plenty.

 

[redbone75]

Doh! Must be the lack of sleep. Thanks for the reminder.

 

[mechBgon]

As a first-strike antivirus scanner, try McAfee's beta scanner.

1) go to http://www.elitekiller.com/malware.htm

2) hit CTRL f to do a page search and type "bloatware". This takes you to the part of the page where it shows how to use the scanner.

3) follow the directions precisely, step-by-step, including using Safe Mode With Command Prompt.

4) when you're done, you might want to post the text from the scanner, found in the C:\Report.html file it generated, so we can see what sorts of malware it found.