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OK my home laptop is really pissing me off. And I have no clue what the hell is going on.

HP laptop Windows XP 2GHz and 500megs RAM. Running a netgear wireless router, running spybot and AVG.

About 2 months ago I noticed it starting to act odd.
1. While surfing in IE or Firefox the images started looking distorted, sometimes they load fine sometimes they only load 1/2 the image, sometimes they look like a negative of the image or a underdeveloped image. Its happening on jpgs and gifs and can happen to any part of any website, seams totally random. And it seems to get worse everyday.

2. Seems like nothing involving Java works anymore

3. Stopped being able to unzip rar files that I downloaded.

4. Then I noticed AVG wont update, then windows wont update, then I notice that no matter what program I download nothing will install or update. Everything errors out. Sometime the error says it not a valid signature, sometimes it says file is corrupt, sometimes is says its a bad cabinet file, sometimes its a bad .dll file. I get different warning depending on what I am trying to install, but nothing will make it past the unpacking stage some don’t even make it that far.

So last month I gave up on trying to fix it and just did a reformat and clean install of windows. Worked fine for the last month…then a couple of days ago i noticed all the EXACT same things happening again. I have trying all kind of stuff from the microsoft support website, nothing is helping.

Could this be a hardware issue? Anyone have any clues or have this problem before? I am at my wits end. I know I need a new faster computer, but I’d like to have the laptop still working for when I travel.

That’s what you get when you hit too many porn sites.

Sounds like you hard drive is hosed.  Have you thought about getting a new hard drive?

I haven’t done anything hardware wise yet…I figured I’d start looking into the hardrive and the RAM next, since I am almost positive its not a virus, I thought last time it might be, but with the clean install I am pretty sure haven’t got one again.

Thing is that overall the computer is still working like normal, its just certain thing that are messing up.

I am kind of curious if it could have to do with my wireless since most of it seems internet based.

Well it appears to be my wireless router is having some problems. I am gonna run without it for a few days and see if everything continues to work.

I’d say, just for shits and giggles, run a deep hard drive scan looking for bad sectors. A bad drive can report itself in various ways that are often inconsistent and frustrating.

how do you do that?

Right click on your drive in My Computer, go to Tools / Chcck Now / check ‘scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors’