General computing questions

[Let'sgoflying!]

1. What would make a virus scan take absolutely forever? We have on laptop Dell with WinXP and the Norton AV scan takes about 4 hours. Sometimes it completely locks up on a Temp file so I quit the process, delete all temp files and cache then restart it all again.

2. Is there a general photoeditor or photoshop share/freeware out there for very minor alterations of pics? My Toshiba came with all this software BUT it was all TRIAL versions! The fine print got the kind person who bought it for me.

3. Is there any way to save a program (not the data)completely intact to a disk or other media? When I formatted my defective harddrive (thanks MS Updates) the hardest thing was not replacing the data, it was getting all the software back on and updated and all my settings where I want them. Download software. Install software. Get updates online. Change settings and preferences. Times 10.

How about a removable drive that I can completely duplicate this entire harddrive as I have it now?

Thanks.
(couldn't find a better forum, sorry mods)

 

[bbchien]

...
For this one you need the master, Mike Andrews. The answer is yes on the duplicate drive. The duplicate can even be stored on removeable media. Linux (entire OS) on a CD.

 

[Brian Austin]

1. What would make a virus scan take absolutely forever? We have on laptop Dell with WinXP and the Norton AV scan takes about 4 hours. Sometimes it completely locks up on a Temp file so I quit the process, delete all temp files and cache then restart it all again.

The temp file is locked by another process and refusing to let anything else access it. You can specify certain folders for non-av scanning in the settings. If you've got real-time protection running, a virus scan doesn't need to be done too often anyway.

2. Is there a general photoeditor or photoshop share/freeware out there for very minor alterations of pics? My Toshiba came with all this software BUT it was all TRIAL versions! The fine print got the kind person who bought it for me.

Haven't played with it for some time but GIMP now has a Win32 installer. Not sure how reliable it is. http://www.gimp.org/windows/

3. Is there any way to save a program (not the data)completely intact to a disk or other media? When I formatted my defective harddrive (thanks MS Updates) the hardest thing was not replacing the data, it was getting all the software back on and updated and all my settings where I want them. Download software. Install software. Get updates online. Change settings and preferences. Times 10.

How about a removable drive that I can completely duplicate this entire harddrive as I have it now?

Thanks.
(couldn't find a better forum, sorry mods)

Ghost is the first program that comes to mind here. I haven't used it for a while since I've got a different imaging system at work. It will image a hard drive to just about any media, including an external hard drive, and provide a bootable CD or floppy for full recovery. Didn't used to be the easiest program to use but they've improved it from what I've heard.