Wide World of Women

I was going to watch a dvd on my computer, for which I normally use the (dvd) F drive. I put the disc in the same way, it opened and closed the same way, but wouldnt play. So I looked on "my computer" and F drive was not listed at all..
The computer has been acting strangely the last month or so. I think I might have picked up something a virus, but Ive never heard of something like this.
I have run Norton anti-virus a few times but it comes back with nothing. Sometimes also, my computer will just randomly freeze for 30 seconds at a time. Entire comp just freezes, not just one screen. I figured it to be caused by some background program like "LiveUpdate" which runs whenever it feels like.
Im confused by this one. Any ideas?

If your computer is freezing up something is wrong. Hows that for a diagnosis. seriously: did another drive number appear like G or H etc. I have had the computer change drive letters for no dam reason.

If there is something wrong with your dvd it will not show up on your computer because it "aint" reading i t. If you have another drive or dvd player try it in that and see if it plays there . also try another dvd or cd and see if that shows up on your computer . I am assuming you have xp. I just bought a new computer with vista and loaded xp after 1 hour of using that useless vista. Vista froze on me twice in one hour and had to call tech support ; JEEZE Oh by the way not to insult your intelligence but make sure the dvd player/recorder is "enabled " (control panel : system : hardware : device manager: disk drives (should show your drive and if its enabled)

Loneranger

Are you using windows?
Uf so right click "My Computer"
Select "properties"
now select the "hardware" tab
Now select "device manager"
look under CD/DVD drives

is your DVD drive listed as showing up?

If yes then right click it and select "uninstall"

reboot the PC,Windows will the re-install it once windows has loaded
hopefully that will sort it

If not then there is the possibility that the DVD drive has died,

Or it could be a myriad of other things.

Is it an IDE or SATA interface?

excellant idea; groovesection uk; uninstalling and reinstalling dvd drive.

I forgot about that 'IM OLD OK! LOL"


Loneranger

I couldn't tell you either way. I bought the computer used from a friend, so I don't know exactly what brand of dvd driver it is. Nothing else was renamed, and I am using XP. But I just don't see the F drive anywhere. I'll reboot things and if it doesn't work, I'll give it my own personal "reboot" with my size 12's

ROFLMAO,If at first you dont succeed,Stick the boot in!

Hate to say it...

But this sounds like the culprit.

I had a drive go bad and did not know it. The only thing that kept occurring was that my computer would randomly freeze repeatedly.

Thought the mouse had gone bad, etc.

Unhooked the power supply to one of the drives...

Then the other...

And found that when I disconnected the power to that particular drive... my computer no longer "froze."
-

And oh yeah...

The first hint was the same problem as yours...

The drive letter completely disappeared (initially) from the Devices with Removable Storage.

Try disconnecting the power supply to your DVD drive and see if it no longer freezes.

If it does not... that is your source.

Off topic but...

Vista is the worst OS ever (seriously).

I purchased my new PC last summer (about a year ago now) and did the same - installed XP on a second drive within an hour of getting it up and running.

A year later... I probably use Vista 5% of the time just so that when XP becomes completely obsolete... I will know my way around it.

(It is very different from XP)

My biggest gripe is not driver compatibility issues but the amount of RAM resources it uses.

I have 3.5GB of RAM.

XP FLIES - Vista is considerably slow(er) with that same amount.

It is absolutely ridiculous the difference between the two on the same PC.

And that indexing feature...

What a pain.

I will be using XP for as long as possible.

(And everyone I know is doing the same)

I've tried several of the suggestions that everyone's put forth and nothing's worked so far. I've never opened up the computer to mess with the innards, but I might just go ahead and get a new computer altogether. My computer is about 8 years old or so, slow processor, and has very little ram memory. Might get a MAC. I keep hearing they're better for graphics and such and can run most of the windows-based programs. This might just be the straw that broke the cameltoe's back..

" Might get a MAC. I keep hearing they're better for graphics and such and can run most of the windows-based programs. This might just be the straw that broke the cameltoe's back..."

Thats the best idea so far.

DVB, I take it from your reply that you use a mac?

Yep!
I own a Mac Pro
Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Harpertown” processors
2GB memory (800MHz DDR2 fully-buffered DIMM ECC)
ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics with 256MB memory

Saved for a year to get it I hear Chuck Norris owns one.

I was looking on the Mac site, and thought about getting the Mac mini, since I already have a decent monitor, and don't need a keyboard and etc. It just seems so odd that they can fit everything that's needed in such a small box.

I second his emotion.

Before you junk it, try running Add Hardware from the Control Panel. See if that will find your DVD player.

You also might want to create a new user account on the PC and see if you can play your DVD from the new account.

Have you looked at the properties of LiveUpdate to see who wrote it? If it the add-on for Desktop search, I recommend you disable it to see if your freezing goes away. I ran the Desktop search add-on for XP for about a week before getting rid of it. I found it took up too many resources on my PC.

http://onecare.live.com/site/en-us/default.htm This is Microsoft free site to check the health of your PC.

How about just doing a full restore. If you are going to junk it anyway. YOU WILL LOOSE ALL YOUR STUFF (unless you backup to an external hard drive or and external cd/dvd burner ;assuming it will read those hardware.

I usually do a full restore every 6 month or less depending on what new software I download and install

Loneranger

I do have a 320GB ext HD and have all my music and alot of my documents and images saved to it. Ive talked to a couple of Mac owners and pretty much made up my mind to just buy one. They said they were tremendously happy once they switched from a PC, and while I will have to buy a lot of software, I would have to buy a lot of software if i got a new PC. The comp i have I bought from a friend, so I dont have the source disks for photoshop and the other programs that I have on here. Id have to buy them all new for a PC so it makes no difference to buy them for Mac. Ive been really annoyed for a long time at the slow speed of my comp. Although I have comcast cable, the speed of my internet is not nearly as fast as it should be. I have very little RAM and always get that "your virtual memory is almost full, windows is increasing..." message. So while Ill spend some money out of pocket at the start, I'll be happier in the long run I think.

What I would like to know though, is how to "scrub" the computer clean for when I give it to someone or etc? I have a program "Clean up" for Windows and I use that regularly to empty the temp files, cache and other things, and it says it has a setting that will "wipe" out all the files, but not sure how well it works or if theres a better program.

I have no idea about your drive, but I wouldn't get a mac. It depends on your purpose as to what's right for you so make sure you do a little research. There's much more software/hardware for a PC. I could never be able to use my fusion gold HDTV card OR my Hauppage component PVR with a Mac. The only downside is Vista, but you could get a PC powerful enough for the Vista or Windows 7 and use XP until Windows 7 is released. You would be surprised how fast a Dual Core processor with over 2GB of RAM will run with XP.

I've been looking for a while. I've heard from a lot of people that Mac's are better for doing graphics / Photoshop / Adobe Illustrator, etc, and that's the kind of thing that I'm really into. I thought about just buying a new HD for my present PC and buying new dvd and cd drives, but I think there's a lot of crap that's "ghosted" on my HD somewhere and I can't get rid of it, or at least that's the term I've heard used. I know there's more things out there for PC, but I've also heard that most of the essential windows-programs have a mac version, except for Publisher. So i could use the same files that I have now. Another thing I heard was that Macs are much less vulnerable to viruses and etc since it's a Linux based system (now I have no idea what Linux is, other than it's not MS-DOS, but that's about it). It's also supposedly more user-friendly with installing hardware and programs. Most of what I do on here (besides coming to the board) is Photoshop, creating logos, doing images and such. So if Macs are better for that, then I'm all for it. It's not cheap so I'm not rushing out to buy it right now. I'll read up some more before doing anything.

I don't need a Mac for games. That's what my PS2 and PSP is for.

Hackers want to threaten the largest home computer user base, so that's why they always make viruses for the peecee. Major malicious viruses for the Mac have been few and far between.

All you need to know about OS X's Unix underpinnings is that it makes the OS extremely stable. If an application crashes, it won't bring down the whole system. I can count on one hand how many times I've had to do a hard restart on my six year old iMac, and it's been smooth running on my MacBook so far. And yes, the Mac interface has always been user friendly.

Of course, Macs are an acquired taste and they certainly aren't cheap. But I'm not complaining!