Crash when I install AV

This seems weird!
I was give this new PC with Vista on it. I thought to try w7 on it.
All seemed fine. I added several apps, like MS Office, and some
games. Still fine.
Then I installed free Avira. Seemed to install fine. But then
suddenly the PC would shut off, much like if it had a short. I had a
H of a time getting started again.
Tried uninstalling Avira in favor of Avast - same thing.
Now it sits with no anti virus, but it is not crashing.
What do you suppose???
JW

On 8/6/2017 5:04 PM, wrote:
This seems weird!
I was give this new PC with Vista on it. I thought to try w7 on it.
All seemed fine. I added several apps, like MS Office, and some
games. Still fine.
Then I installed free Avira. Seemed to install fine. But then
suddenly the PC would shut off, much like if it had a short. I had a
H of a time getting started again.
Tried uninstalling Avira in favor of Avast - same thing.
Now it sits with no anti virus, but it is not crashing.
What do you suppose???
JW



Your new installation might include malware. There are some malware
that will crash a system if an anti-virus application is detected.
This, of course, is often part of malware design: kill the anti-virus
before the anti-virus kills the virus.

Where did you get the Windows 7 that you installed?

--
David E. Ross
http://www.rossde.com/

President Trump demands loyalty to himself from Republican members
of Congress. I always thought that members of Congress -- House
and Senate -- were required to be loyal to the people of the
United States. In any case, they all swore an oath of office
to be loyal to the Constitution.

wrote:
I was give this new PC with Vista on it. I thought to try w7 on it.
All seemed fine. I added several apps, like MS Office, and some
games. Still fine.
Then I installed free Avira. Seemed to install fine. But then
suddenly the PC would shut off, much like if it had a short. I had a
H of a time getting started again.
Tried uninstalling Avira in favor of Avast - same thing.
Now it sits with no anti virus, but it is not crashing.
What do you suppose???

As a generality, AV ware puts more demands on the system; uses more
resources. If something about your hardware/software situation puts it
'on the edge', then the AV could conceivably push it over.

What does 'new PC with Vista' mean? It is an old system but new to you?
What is this hardware brand name and modelno and such info as CPU and ram?



--
Mike Easter

Wayne wrote:

I was give this new PC with Vista on it. I thought to try w7 on it.
All seemed fine. I added several apps, like MS Office, and some
games. Still fine. Then I installed free Avira. Seemed to install
fine. But then suddenly the PC would shut off, much like if it had a
short. I had a H of a time getting started again. Tried uninstalling
Avira in favor of Avast - same thing. Now it sits with no anti virus,
but it is not crashing. What do you suppose???

Your description looks like you got a used PC donated to you, and it had
Vista already installed (and whatever else the donor had previously
installed knowingly or unknowingly) along with whatever pollution or
corruption was already in place. When you "tried" Windows 7, did you do
an upgrade from Vista to 7 or did you do a fresh install of 7 (which
means the partition got wiped in a reformat before the OS installed)?
If you're not going to multi-boot to other operating systems on the same
PC or you have no preferences to 7 residing in 1 or 2 partitions for a
fresh install, have the Win7 setup program delete all partitions and let
it create the ones it wants (recovery and OS partitions). The exception
would be to leave the recovery partition if you want it available to
restore the PC back to the factory state (assuming this was some branded
PC rather than a home-built); however, that means the restore from that
recovery partition would take it back to the factory-time Vista image.

Is there just one partition in one HDD or SSD or are there more
partitions on one HDD/SSD or multiple HDDs/SSDs? Other than the OS
partition to wipe in a fresh install of 7, were the other partitions
wiped, too? Did you start fresh with 7 or did you evolve from a
polluted setup?

Unless you spend a LOT of time to disinfect and cleanup a used PC to
make sure it is clean, upgrading to the next OS from an unknown state
means you don't know what you end up with.

wrote:
This seems weird!
I was give this new PC with Vista on it. I thought to try w7 on it.
All seemed fine. I added several apps, like MS Office, and some
games. Still fine.
Then I installed free Avira. Seemed to install fine. But then
suddenly the PC would shut off, much like if it had a short. I had a
H of a time getting started again.
Tried uninstalling Avira in favor of Avast - same thing.
Now it sits with no anti virus, but it is not crashing.
What do you suppose???
JW

Can you start in Safe Mode with the anti virus turned off?
It almost sounds like the added load of full time anti virus
is too much for the ram or power supply.

David E. Ross wrote:
On 8/6/2017 5:04 PM, wrote:
This seems weird!
I was give this new PC with Vista on it. I thought to try w7 on it.
All seemed fine. I added several apps, like MS Office, and some
games. Still fine.
Then I installed free Avira. Seemed to install fine. But then
suddenly the PC would shut off, much like if it had a short. I had a
H of a time getting started again.
Tried uninstalling Avira in favor of Avast - same thing.
Now it sits with no anti virus, but it is not crashing.
What do you suppose???
JW



Your new installation might include malware. There are some malware
that will crash a system if an anti-virus application is detected.
This, of course, is often part of malware design: kill the anti-virus
before the anti-virus kills the virus.

Where did you get the Windows 7 that you installed?


If you did an upgrade install, migrating installed programs
from Vista to Win7, then the malware might have already been
in Vista.

Upgrade/Repair installs (i.e. run Setup.exe off the inserted
Win7 DVD, while Vista is booted), they can take care of trivial
forms of malware (like an adware perhaps, or clean out a few
left over registry entries that the adware used). But generally
an Upgrade install cannot fix everything.

For peace of mind, if the status of the machine was unknown
and you found it sitting on the curb, you'd do a "Clean" install
by booting the Win7 DVD and doing the install from there.

The install process generally gives you some information
about what it is going to keep. A clean install will tell you
that user data will be lost, and all programs will need to be
re-installed. But that process also cleans house of any
malware that might have been there.

*******

If I want to be absolutely certain about a hard drive,
I boot the installer DVD and select the option to use
Command Prompt (instead of installing). From there,
I can do:

diskpart
list disk
select disk 2
clean all
exit

You have to be careful, to identify the disks and only
erase the desired disk. In my example, disk 2 would be
the third disk down in the Disk Management table. You
can list the partitions on the disk, for confirmation
of what partitions are on there.

The "clean all" command writes every sector on the disk
with zeros. The only way it's going to miss any area of
the disk, is if a Host Protected Area (HPA) is present.
Working with HPAs is a PITA, due to hardware restrictions.
My current machine is a lucky one, in that the IDE cable
is HPA-capable, and I can follow the recipe here to
check or remove stuff like this. All my SATA ports are
locked. I use an IDE to SATA adapter (dongle), to do HPA work
on SATA drives. Some OEM computing products, use an HPA
and a special boot loader, to multiplex five partitions
into a four slot partition table, and a crafty individual
could hide malware in the maintenance partition (so it
gets muxed in when a special key is pressed at startup).
But that's a pretty obscure straw-man.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_protected_area

Paul

wrote:
This seems weird!
I was give this new PC with Vista on it. I thought to try w7 on it.
All seemed fine. I added several apps, like MS Office, and some
games. Still fine.
Then I installed free Avira. Seemed to install fine. But then
suddenly the PC would shut off, much like if it had a short. I had a
H of a time getting started again.
Tried uninstalling Avira in favor of Avast - same thing.
Now it sits with no anti virus, but it is not crashing.
What do you suppose???
JW

Offline scan ?

http://support.kaspersky.com/8092#block2

More than one AV company, makes an offline scanning
disc. You boot the CD, the tool gets an AV definition
update, and then you get to choose a partition to be scanned.

It's not going to identify everything, but it might find
the more trivial stuff. For example, I hide (in plain sight)
a copy of the EICAR test virus, for the offline scanner
to detect, so I can be assured it's actually working.
As the short text string on this page, is one of the
signatures the offline scanner will have in its 100MB
database.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EICAR_test_file

*******

An offline scan, all it can do is "signature analysis".

Scanners are available which do online scans. For example,
Malwarebytes makes a free on-demand scanner, and it checks
for "hooks", code "touching" things that it should not. So
that's a different kind of scan, and works best if the
infected OS is running. Malwarebytes on-demand is similar
to the offline scanners, in that it will want to download
some up-to-date definitions before the scan starts.

With Malwarebytes, you don't want "trial mode", you just
want the on-demand scanner. The hardest part, is getting
just the function you want.

*******

Even brand-new computers should be "tested" by the user.
The memtest86+ is used to sweep just about all of the
DIMMs (misses around 1MB of stuff or so). If you're good,
you can test pairs of DIMMs, in single channel mode, swap
the DIMMs (swap the Low and High DIMM) and test every stinking
byte. But most people aren't quite that thorough, and just
leave th box bolted together while doing an "acceptance"
test. The purpose of these tests, is to prove
"it's really a computer, and not a crashing random number generator".

http://www.memtest.org/ (scroll half-way down to the downloads)

I also like to run Prime95 in Torture Test mode, to make
sure the CPU is stable. For example, I can boot a Linux DVD,
and run MPrime from there, so that no Windows OS is necessary.
I might run this for four to sixteen hours, and it runs on all
cores. Modern versions of this code, use AVX, but some users
don't really want it to do that.

https://www.mersenne.org/download/

For video card testing, there aren't really a lot of good
choices for that. You can use 3DMark, some version of that
in demo mode, to exercise a video card. And maybe that will
warm it up enough to test that the card isn't flaky. While
there is Furmark, I don't think it's quite like Prime95,
and it probably isn't checking the veracity of operation.
You'd be relying on a driver crash, to flag that maybe
something wasn't completely kosher. Modern video card
drivers "de-tune" Furmark on purpose, to avoid burning
up the video card. The driver can recognize the Furmark
method of testing, and modify it a bit so it doesn't
cook the card.

Once you've verified the hardware on your "new" computer,
*then* you can return to your anti-malware adventures.

Paul

On Sun, 06 Aug 2017 23:22:11 -0400, Paul
wrote:

David E. Ross wrote:
On 8/6/2017 5:04 PM, wrote:
This seems weird!
I was give this new PC with Vista on it. I thought to try w7 on it.
All seemed fine. I added several apps, like MS Office, and some
games. Still fine.
Then I installed free Avira. Seemed to install fine. But then
suddenly the PC would shut off, much like if it had a short. I had a
H of a time getting started again.
Tried uninstalling Avira in favor of Avast - same thing.
Now it sits with no anti virus, but it is not crashing.
What do you suppose???
JW



Your new installation might include malware. There are some malware
that will crash a system if an anti-virus application is detected.
This, of course, is often part of malware design: kill the anti-virus
before the anti-virus kills the virus.

Where did you get the Windows 7 that you installed?

Got a suspicious looking disk with the machine. which by the way, I
did not find. It and the machine came from an acquaintance at an old
folks group I joined. Hmmmm.
..


If you did an upgrade install, migrating installed programs
from Vista to Win7, then the malware might have already been
in Vista.

Upgrade/Repair installs (i.e. run Setup.exe off the inserted
Win7 DVD, while Vista is booted), they can take care of trivial
forms of malware (like an adware perhaps, or clean out a few
left over registry entries that the adware used). But generally
an Upgrade install cannot fix everything.

For peace of mind, if the status of the machine was unknown
and you found it sitting on the curb, you'd do a "Clean" install
by booting the Win7 DVD and doing the install from there.

Hi Paul -

The Vista is gone, but I shud redo the W7 install without preserving
the Vista data etc. I shuda thought of that. I had not experienced
anything like this before.
JW

The install process generally gives you some information
about what it is going to keep. A clean install will tell you
that user data will be lost, and all programs will need to be
re-installed. But that process also cleans house of any
malware that might have been there.

*******

If I want to be absolutely certain about a hard drive,
I boot the installer DVD and select the option to use
Command Prompt (instead of installing). From there,
I can do:

diskpart
list disk
select disk 2
clean all
exit

You have to be careful, to identify the disks and only
erase the desired disk. In my example, disk 2 would be
the third disk down in the Disk Management table. You
can list the partitions on the disk, for confirmation
of what partitions are on there.

The "clean all" command writes every sector on the disk
with zeros. The only way it's going to miss any area of
the disk, is if a Host Protected Area (HPA) is present.
Working with HPAs is a PITA, due to hardware restrictions.
My current machine is a lucky one, in that the IDE cable
is HPA-capable, and I can follow the recipe here to
check or remove stuff like this. All my SATA ports are
locked. I use an IDE to SATA adapter (dongle), to do HPA work
on SATA drives. Some OEM computing products, use an HPA
and a special boot loader, to multiplex five partitions
into a four slot partition table, and a crafty individual
could hide malware in the maintenance partition (so it
gets muxed in when a special key is pressed at startup).
But that's a pretty obscure straw-man.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_protected_area

Paul

On Mon, 07 Aug 2017 04:58:26 -0400, wrote:

On Sun, 06 Aug 2017 23:22:11 -0400, Paul
wrote:

David E. Ross wrote:
On 8/6/2017 5:04 PM, wrote:
This seems weird!
I was give this new PC with Vista on it. I thought to try w7 on it.
All seemed fine. I added several apps, like MS Office, and some
games. Still fine.
Then I installed free Avira. Seemed to install fine. But then
suddenly the PC would shut off, much like if it had a short. I had a
H of a time getting started again.
Tried uninstalling Avira in favor of Avast - same thing.
Now it sits with no anti virus, but it is not crashing.
What do you suppose???
JW



Your new installation might include malware. There are some malware
that will crash a system if an anti-virus application is detected.
This, of course, is often part of malware design: kill the anti-virus
before the anti-virus kills the virus.

Where did you get the Windows 7 that you installed?

Got a suspicious looking disk with the machine. which by the way, I
did not find. It and the machine came from an acquaintance at an old
folks group I joined. Hmmmm.
.


If you did an upgrade install, migrating installed programs
from Vista to Win7, then the malware might have already been
in Vista.

Upgrade/Repair installs (i.e. run Setup.exe off the inserted
Win7 DVD, while Vista is booted), they can take care of trivial
forms of malware (like an adware perhaps, or clean out a few
left over registry entries that the adware used). But generally
an Upgrade install cannot fix everything.

For peace of mind, if the status of the machine was unknown
and you found it sitting on the curb, you'd do a "Clean" install
by booting the Win7 DVD and doing the install from there.

Hi Paul -

The Vista is gone, but I shud redo the W7 install without preserving
the Vista data etc. I shuda thought of that. I had not experienced
anything like this before.
JW

The install process generally gives you some information
about what it is going to keep. A clean install will tell you
that user data will be lost, and all programs will need to be
re-installed. But that process also cleans house of any
malware that might have been there.

*******

If I want to be absolutely certain about a hard drive,
I boot the installer DVD and select the option to use
Command Prompt (instead of installing). From there,
I can do:

diskpart
list disk
select disk 2
clean all
exit

You have to be careful, to identify the disks and only
erase the desired disk. In my example, disk 2 would be
the third disk down in the Disk Management table. You
can list the partitions on the disk, for confirmation
of what partitions are on there.

The "clean all" command writes every sector on the disk
with zeros. The only way it's going to miss any area of
the disk, is if a Host Protected Area (HPA) is present.
Working with HPAs is a PITA, due to hardware restrictions.
My current machine is a lucky one, in that the IDE cable
is HPA-capable, and I can follow the recipe here to
check or remove stuff like this. All my SATA ports are
locked. I use an IDE to SATA adapter (dongle), to do HPA work
on SATA drives. Some OEM computing products, use an HPA
and a special boot loader, to multiplex five partitions
into a four slot partition table, and a crafty individual
could hide malware in the maintenance partition (so it
gets muxed in when a special key is pressed at startup).
But that's a pretty obscure straw-man.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_protected_area

Paul
Well, I still have a problem. As I said, I wiped the hard drive
(format) and re-did the W7 install. As soon as I then installed Avira
, and then undid it and installed Avast, the PC went into crash mode.
IE, it powered off both times..
I re-did the same W7 install, and tried free AVG, and lo. it has not
crashed yet after 24 hours. Task Manager says AVG is indeed running.
What do you think now?
JW

On 8/8/2017 4:36 AM, wrote:
On Mon, 07 Aug 2017 04:58:26 -0400, wrote:

On Sun, 06 Aug 2017 23:22:11 -0400, Paul
wrote:

David E. Ross wrote:
On 8/6/2017 5:04 PM, wrote:
This seems weird!
I was give this new PC with Vista on it. I thought to try w7 on it.
All seemed fine. I added several apps, like MS Office, and some
games. Still fine.
Then I installed free Avira. Seemed to install fine. But then
suddenly the PC would shut off, much like if it had a short. I had a
H of a time getting started again.
Tried uninstalling Avira in favor of Avast - same thing.
Now it sits with no anti virus, but it is not crashing.
What do you suppose???
JW



Your new installation might include malware. There are some malware
that will crash a system if an anti-virus application is detected.
This, of course, is often part of malware design: kill the anti-virus
before the anti-virus kills the virus.

Where did you get the Windows 7 that you installed?

Got a suspicious looking disk with the machine. which by the way, I
did not find. It and the machine came from an acquaintance at an old
folks group I joined. Hmmmm.
.


If you did an upgrade install, migrating installed programs
from Vista to Win7, then the malware might have already been
in Vista.

Upgrade/Repair installs (i.e. run Setup.exe off the inserted
Win7 DVD, while Vista is booted), they can take care of trivial
forms of malware (like an adware perhaps, or clean out a few
left over registry entries that the adware used). But generally
an Upgrade install cannot fix everything.

For peace of mind, if the status of the machine was unknown
and you found it sitting on the curb, you'd do a "Clean" install
by booting the Win7 DVD and doing the install from there.

Hi Paul -

The Vista is gone, but I shud redo the W7 install without preserving
the Vista data etc. I shuda thought of that. I had not experienced
anything like this before.
JW

The install process generally gives you some information
about what it is going to keep. A clean install will tell you
that user data will be lost, and all programs will need to be
re-installed. But that process also cleans house of any
malware that might have been there.

*******

If I want to be absolutely certain about a hard drive,
I boot the installer DVD and select the option to use
Command Prompt (instead of installing). From there,
I can do:

diskpart
list disk
select disk 2
clean all
exit

You have to be careful, to identify the disks and only
erase the desired disk. In my example, disk 2 would be
the third disk down in the Disk Management table. You
can list the partitions on the disk, for confirmation
of what partitions are on there.

The "clean all" command writes every sector on the disk
with zeros. The only way it's going to miss any area of
the disk, is if a Host Protected Area (HPA) is present.
Working with HPAs is a PITA, due to hardware restrictions.
My current machine is a lucky one, in that the IDE cable
is HPA-capable, and I can follow the recipe here to
check or remove stuff like this. All my SATA ports are
locked. I use an IDE to SATA adapter (dongle), to do HPA work
on SATA drives. Some OEM computing products, use an HPA
and a special boot loader, to multiplex five partitions
into a four slot partition table, and a crafty individual
could hide malware in the maintenance partition (so it
gets muxed in when a special key is pressed at startup).
But that's a pretty obscure straw-man.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_protected_area

Paul
Well, I still have a problem. As I said, I wiped the hard drive
(format) and re-did the W7 install. As soon as I then installed Avira
, and then undid it and installed Avast, the PC went into crash mode.
IE, it powered off both times..
I re-did the same W7 install, and tried free AVG, and lo. it has not
crashed yet after 24 hours. Task Manager says AVG is indeed running.
What do you think now?
JW

I have an old, never updated, copy of Avira on my TV machine.
Last week it started behaving weirdly. Avira was using 65% of the cpu
for no good reason. I tried all day to delete it without success.
I'm reinstalling windows now. Google avira and you'll find a lot
of unhappy people.

wrote:
On Mon, 07 Aug 2017 04:58:26 -0400, wrote:

On Sun, 06 Aug 2017 23:22:11 -0400, Paul
wrote:

David E. Ross wrote:
On 8/6/2017 5:04 PM, wrote:
This seems weird!
I was give this new PC with Vista on it. I thought to try w7 on it.
All seemed fine. I added several apps, like MS Office, and some
games. Still fine.
Then I installed free Avira. Seemed to install fine. But then
suddenly the PC would shut off, much like if it had a short. I had a
H of a time getting started again.
Tried uninstalling Avira in favor of Avast - same thing.
Now it sits with no anti virus, but it is not crashing.
What do you suppose???
JW


Your new installation might include malware. There are some malware
that will crash a system if an anti-virus application is detected.
This, of course, is often part of malware design: kill the anti-virus
before the anti-virus kills the virus.

Where did you get the Windows 7 that you installed?
Got a suspicious looking disk with the machine. which by the way, I
did not find. It and the machine came from an acquaintance at an old
folks group I joined. Hmmmm.
.
If you did an upgrade install, migrating installed programs
from Vista to Win7, then the malware might have already been
in Vista.

Upgrade/Repair installs (i.e. run Setup.exe off the inserted
Win7 DVD, while Vista is booted), they can take care of trivial
forms of malware (like an adware perhaps, or clean out a few
left over registry entries that the adware used). But generally
an Upgrade install cannot fix everything.

For peace of mind, if the status of the machine was unknown
and you found it sitting on the curb, you'd do a "Clean" install
by booting the Win7 DVD and doing the install from there.
Hi Paul -

The Vista is gone, but I shud redo the W7 install without preserving
the Vista data etc. I shuda thought of that. I had not experienced
anything like this before.
JW
The install process generally gives you some information
about what it is going to keep. A clean install will tell you
that user data will be lost, and all programs will need to be
re-installed. But that process also cleans house of any
malware that might have been there.

*******

If I want to be absolutely certain about a hard drive,
I boot the installer DVD and select the option to use
Command Prompt (instead of installing). From there,
I can do:

diskpart
list disk
select disk 2
clean all
exit

You have to be careful, to identify the disks and only
erase the desired disk. In my example, disk 2 would be
the third disk down in the Disk Management table. You
can list the partitions on the disk, for confirmation
of what partitions are on there.

The "clean all" command writes every sector on the disk
with zeros. The only way it's going to miss any area of
the disk, is if a Host Protected Area (HPA) is present.
Working with HPAs is a PITA, due to hardware restrictions.
My current machine is a lucky one, in that the IDE cable
is HPA-capable, and I can follow the recipe here to
check or remove stuff like this. All my SATA ports are
locked. I use an IDE to SATA adapter (dongle), to do HPA work
on SATA drives. Some OEM computing products, use an HPA
and a special boot loader, to multiplex five partitions
into a four slot partition table, and a crafty individual
could hide malware in the maintenance partition (so it
gets muxed in when a special key is pressed at startup).
But that's a pretty obscure straw-man.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_protected_area

Paul
Well, I still have a problem. As I said, I wiped the hard drive
(format) and re-did the W7 install. As soon as I then installed Avira
, and then undid it and installed Avast, the PC went into crash mode.
IE, it powered off both times..
I re-did the same W7 install, and tried free AVG, and lo. it has not
crashed yet after 24 hours. Task Manager says AVG is indeed running.
What do you think now?
JW

That's pretty good proof of an AV problem.

However, that's not absolute proof.

*******

Any time you get a computer in hand, whether it's
fresh from the production line, or it's been sitting
in the garage for ten years... you test it.

And, you run the same tests in both cases.

This is called "acceptance testing". It's your
way of proving "yes, this is a computer, it's not
a brick".

Not only must you do such a test when a computer
arrives on your bench. You must also test it
yearly (at least do a memory test). When memory fails
here, it might be every 1.5 years or so when I see
trouble. So once a year, you could give it a test
overnight and see whether anything has changed.

Good memory can go bad. I had a stick of Crucial
Ballistix blow out on me, and one chip went completely
nuts. And it wasn't overvolted or abused either.
When tested with memtest86+, the errors scrolled
off the screen, because each and every long-word
was bad. (One byte lane, coming out of one completely-nuts
chip, ensured a never ending scroll of errors.)
So there I had one good branded RAM (before Micron
ran into trouble), just blow up on me one day. Kablooie.
One of my first problems, was finding a DIMM pattern
in the sockets, so the machine would stay up long
enough to load memtest :-) For that problem, I
needed a GOOD DIMM in low memory, so the memtest86+
floppy could boot. Then if the BAD DIMM was up high,
after a few seconds, the test would hit that bad chip.
I had to keep flipping stuff around in the slots,
until I could get the test to start.

*******

Let's take my current machine.

One year, I put 4x2GB DDR2 in it. Tested it, all is fine.

Much later, I'm seeing problems. The problem seems to
"move" from one day to the next, as if something is loading
in a different place in RAM, with respect to a problem area.
The computer went from healthy, to almost unusable.

I finally manage to catch a memory error with memtest86+.
Adjusting Vnb this time is not helping.

Now, normally I test the sticks one at a time, so I know
exactly which one to replace. When tested individually,
or in pairs, I *cannot* detect a problem with this set of
sticks. I can only see a memory error when all four sticks
are plugged in (power or bus loading makes a difference).

I ended up replacing all four sticks, so I could be
sure of fixing it. Ran another memory test. It's clean
again.

*******

Chancea are, your analysis is sufficient, and this is
just an AV problem. But you should also run memtest86+
for peace of mind. Even letting it run for one full pass
is enough. That might take a couple hours.

When tested that way, without additional work, around
1MB of RAM is not tested. This is the E810 reserved
region. Memtest86+ asks the BIOS for info about reserved
areas, and then it's not supposed to trample on stuff
the BIOS is using. And that amounts to around 1MB or
so.

If you really want to know whether every byte is good,
you put two sticks in single channel mode (put the sticks
on the same channel), run memtest86+. Then, if it passes,
you shut down, and swap the two DIMMs in single channel
mode. This causes the high memory DIMM to become the
low memory DIMM and vice versa. The low memory DIMM
is the one that isn't fully tested. But when swapped as
the high memory DIMM, the test on that run covers everything.
You must use two sticks, to guarantee the high memory DIMM
has no reservations on it. If you insert just one stick
in the computer, and run memtest86+, then the bottom
1MB is reserved and testing is not 100% complete.

While memtest86+ comes pretty close to testing all RAM,
you have to do a little extra work if you expect complete
test coverage. I think you can see, how memory in the BIOS
area that was defective, would be a wee bit difficult
to isolate.

Paul

On Tue, 08 Aug 2017 08:18:12 -0400, Paul
wrote:

wrote:
On Mon, 07 Aug 2017 04:58:26 -0400, wrote:

On Sun, 06 Aug 2017 23:22:11 -0400, Paul
wrote:

David E. Ross wrote:
On 8/6/2017 5:04 PM, wrote:
This seems weird!
I was give this new PC with Vista on it. I thought to try w7 on it.
All seemed fine. I added several apps, like MS Office, and some
games. Still fine.
Then I installed free Avira. Seemed to install fine. But then
suddenly the PC would shut off, much like if it had a short. I had a
H of a time getting started again.
Tried uninstalling Avira in favor of Avast - same thing.
Now it sits with no anti virus, but it is not crashing.
What do you suppose???
JW


Your new installation might include malware. There are some malware
that will crash a system if an anti-virus application is detected.
This, of course, is often part of malware design: kill the anti-virus
before the anti-virus kills the virus.

Where did you get the Windows 7 that you installed?
Got a suspicious looking disk with the machine. which by the way, I
did not find. It and the machine came from an acquaintance at an old
folks group I joined. Hmmmm.
.
If you did an upgrade install, migrating installed programs
from Vista to Win7, then the malware might have already been
in Vista.

Upgrade/Repair installs (i.e. run Setup.exe off the inserted
Win7 DVD, while Vista is booted), they can take care of trivial
forms of malware (like an adware perhaps, or clean out a few
left over registry entries that the adware used). But generally
an Upgrade install cannot fix everything.

For peace of mind, if the status of the machine was unknown
and you found it sitting on the curb, you'd do a "Clean" install
by booting the Win7 DVD and doing the install from there.
Hi Paul -

The Vista is gone, but I shud redo the W7 install without preserving
the Vista data etc. I shuda thought of that. I had not experienced
anything like this before.
JW
The install process generally gives you some information
about what it is going to keep. A clean install will tell you
that user data will be lost, and all programs will need to be
re-installed. But that process also cleans house of any
malware that might have been there.

*******

If I want to be absolutely certain about a hard drive,
I boot the installer DVD and select the option to use
Command Prompt (instead of installing). From there,
I can do:

diskpart
list disk
select disk 2
clean all
exit

You have to be careful, to identify the disks and only
erase the desired disk. In my example, disk 2 would be
the third disk down in the Disk Management table. You
can list the partitions on the disk, for confirmation
of what partitions are on there.

The "clean all" command writes every sector on the disk
with zeros. The only way it's going to miss any area of
the disk, is if a Host Protected Area (HPA) is present.
Working with HPAs is a PITA, due to hardware restrictions.
My current machine is a lucky one, in that the IDE cable
is HPA-capable, and I can follow the recipe here to
check or remove stuff like this. All my SATA ports are
locked. I use an IDE to SATA adapter (dongle), to do HPA work
on SATA drives. Some OEM computing products, use an HPA
and a special boot loader, to multiplex five partitions
into a four slot partition table, and a crafty individual
could hide malware in the maintenance partition (so it
gets muxed in when a special key is pressed at startup).
But that's a pretty obscure straw-man.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_protected_area

Paul
Well, I still have a problem. As I said, I wiped the hard drive
(format) and re-did the W7 install. As soon as I then installed Avira
, and then undid it and installed Avast, the PC went into crash mode.
IE, it powered off both times..
I re-did the same W7 install, and tried free AVG, and lo. it has not
crashed yet after 24 hours. Task Manager says AVG is indeed running.
What do you think now?
JW

That's pretty good proof of an AV problem.

However, that's not absolute proof.

*******

Any time you get a computer in hand, whether it's
fresh from the production line, or it's been sitting
in the garage for ten years... you test it.

And, you run the same tests in both cases.

This is called "acceptance testing". It's your
way of proving "yes, this is a computer, it's not
a brick".

Not only must you do such a test when a computer
arrives on your bench. You must also test it
yearly (at least do a memory test). When memory fails
here, it might be every 1.5 years or so when I see
trouble. So once a year, you could give it a test
overnight and see whether anything has changed.

Good memory can go bad. I had a stick of Crucial
Ballistix blow out on me, and one chip went completely
nuts. And it wasn't overvolted or abused either.
When tested with memtest86+, the errors scrolled
off the screen, because each and every long-word
was bad. (One byte lane, coming out of one completely-nuts
chip, ensured a never ending scroll of errors.)
So there I had one good branded RAM (before Micron
ran into trouble), just blow up on me one day. Kablooie.
One of my first problems, was finding a DIMM pattern
in the sockets, so the machine would stay up long
enough to load memtest :-) For that problem, I
needed a GOOD DIMM in low memory, so the memtest86+
floppy could boot. Then if the BAD DIMM was up high,
after a few seconds, the test would hit that bad chip.
I had to keep flipping stuff around in the slots,
until I could get the test to start.

*******

Let's take my current machine.

One year, I put 4x2GB DDR2 in it. Tested it, all is fine.

Much later, I'm seeing problems. The problem seems to
"move" from one day to the next, as if something is loading
in a different place in RAM, with respect to a problem area.
The computer went from healthy, to almost unusable.

I finally manage to catch a memory error with memtest86+.
Adjusting Vnb this time is not helping.

Now, normally I test the sticks one at a time, so I know
exactly which one to replace. When tested individually,
or in pairs, I *cannot* detect a problem with this set of
sticks. I can only see a memory error when all four sticks
are plugged in (power or bus loading makes a difference).

I ended up replacing all four sticks, so I could be
sure of fixing it. Ran another memory test. It's clean
again.

*******

Chancea are, your analysis is sufficient, and this is
just an AV problem. But you should also run memtest86+
for peace of mind. Even letting it run for one full pass
is enough. That might take a couple hours.

When tested that way, without additional work, around
1MB of RAM is not tested. This is the E810 reserved
region. Memtest86+ asks the BIOS for info about reserved
areas, and then it's not supposed to trample on stuff
the BIOS is using. And that amounts to around 1MB or
so.

If you really want to know whether every byte is good,
you put two sticks in single channel mode (put the sticks
on the same channel), run memtest86+. Then, if it passes,
you shut down, and swap the two DIMMs in single channel
mode. This causes the high memory DIMM to become the
low memory DIMM and vice versa. The low memory DIMM
is the one that isn't fully tested. But when swapped as
the high memory DIMM, the test on that run covers everything.
You must use two sticks, to guarantee the high memory DIMM
has no reservations on it. If you insert just one stick
in the computer, and run memtest86+, then the bottom
1MB is reserved and testing is not 100% complete.

While memtest86+ comes pretty close to testing all RAM,
you have to do a little extra work if you expect complete
test coverage. I think you can see, how memory in the BIOS
area that was defective, would be a wee bit difficult
to isolate.

Paul

Interesting.

Maybe I can scout up some RAM to see if problem goes away.
John

On Tue, 08 Aug 2017 04:59:34 -0700, mike wrote:

I have an old, never updated, copy of Avira on my TV machine.
Last week it started behaving weirdly. Avira was using 65% of the cpu
for no good reason. I tried all day to delete it without success.
I'm reinstalling windows now. Google avira and you'll find a lot
of unhappy people.

Google almost_anything and you'll find a lot of unhappy people.

I've been using Avira since somewhere around 2004-2005 and I'm happy
with it, but I don't post about it because it just works. People only
tend to post when something doesn't work, so it should make sense that
there are more complaints than praises out there for Google to see.

--

Char Jackson

On Tue, 08 Aug 2017 09:46:54 -0500, Char Jackson
wrote:

On Tue, 08 Aug 2017 04:59:34 -0700, mike wrote:

I have an old, never updated, copy of Avira on my TV machine.
Last week it started behaving weirdly. Avira was using 65% of the cpu
for no good reason. I tried all day to delete it without success.
I'm reinstalling windows now. Google avira and you'll find a lot
of unhappy people.

Google almost_anything and you'll find a lot of unhappy people.

I've been using Avira since somewhere around 2004-2005 and I'm happy
with it, but I don't post about it because it just works. People only
tend to post when something doesn't work, so it should make sense that
there are more complaints than praises out there for Google to see.


A strong ditto to the above!

Or to put it another way, hang around a transmission shop, and you'll
think that all cars have transmission problems.

wrote:
On Tue, 08 Aug 2017 08:18:12 -0400, Paul
wrote:

wrote:
On Mon, 07 Aug 2017 04:58:26 -0400, wrote:

On Sun, 06 Aug 2017 23:22:11 -0400, Paul
wrote:

David E. Ross wrote:
On 8/6/2017 5:04 PM, wrote:
This seems weird!
I was give this new PC with Vista on it. I thought to try w7 on it.
All seemed fine. I added several apps, like MS Office, and some
games. Still fine.
Then I installed free Avira. Seemed to install fine. But then
suddenly the PC would shut off, much like if it had a short. I had a
H of a time getting started again.
Tried uninstalling Avira in favor of Avast - same thing.
Now it sits with no anti virus, but it is not crashing.
What do you suppose???
JW


Your new installation might include malware. There are some malware
that will crash a system if an anti-virus application is detected.
This, of course, is often part of malware design: kill the anti-virus
before the anti-virus kills the virus.

Where did you get the Windows 7 that you installed?
Got a suspicious looking disk with the machine. which by the way, I
did not find. It and the machine came from an acquaintance at an old
folks group I joined. Hmmmm.
.
If you did an upgrade install, migrating installed programs
from Vista to Win7, then the malware might have already been
in Vista.

Upgrade/Repair installs (i.e. run Setup.exe off the inserted
Win7 DVD, while Vista is booted), they can take care of trivial
forms of malware (like an adware perhaps, or clean out a few
left over registry entries that the adware used). But generally
an Upgrade install cannot fix everything.

For peace of mind, if the status of the machine was unknown
and you found it sitting on the curb, you'd do a "Clean" install
by booting the Win7 DVD and doing the install from there.
Hi Paul -

The Vista is gone, but I shud redo the W7 install without preserving
the Vista data etc. I shuda thought of that. I had not experienced
anything like this before.
JW
The install process generally gives you some information
about what it is going to keep. A clean install will tell you
that user data will be lost, and all programs will need to be
re-installed. But that process also cleans house of any
malware that might have been there.

*******

If I want to be absolutely certain about a hard drive,
I boot the installer DVD and select the option to use
Command Prompt (instead of installing). From there,
I can do:

diskpart
list disk
select disk 2
clean all
exit

You have to be careful, to identify the disks and only
erase the desired disk. In my example, disk 2 would be
the third disk down in the Disk Management table. You
can list the partitions on the disk, for confirmation
of what partitions are on there.

The "clean all" command writes every sector on the disk
with zeros. The only way it's going to miss any area of
the disk, is if a Host Protected Area (HPA) is present.
Working with HPAs is a PITA, due to hardware restrictions.
My current machine is a lucky one, in that the IDE cable
is HPA-capable, and I can follow the recipe here to
check or remove stuff like this. All my SATA ports are
locked. I use an IDE to SATA adapter (dongle), to do HPA work
on SATA drives. Some OEM computing products, use an HPA
and a special boot loader, to multiplex five partitions
into a four slot partition table, and a crafty individual
could hide malware in the maintenance partition (so it
gets muxed in when a special key is pressed at startup).
But that's a pretty obscure straw-man.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_protected_area

Paul
Well, I still have a problem. As I said, I wiped the hard drive
(format) and re-did the W7 install. As soon as I then installed Avira
, and then undid it and installed Avast, the PC went into crash mode.
IE, it powered off both times..
I re-did the same W7 install, and tried free AVG, and lo. it has not
crashed yet after 24 hours. Task Manager says AVG is indeed running.
What do you think now?
JW
That's pretty good proof of an AV problem.

However, that's not absolute proof.

*******

Any time you get a computer in hand, whether it's
fresh from the production line, or it's been sitting
in the garage for ten years... you test it.

And, you run the same tests in both cases.

This is called "acceptance testing". It's your
way of proving "yes, this is a computer, it's not
a brick".

Not only must you do such a test when a computer
arrives on your bench. You must also test it
yearly (at least do a memory test). When memory fails
here, it might be every 1.5 years or so when I see
trouble. So once a year, you could give it a test
overnight and see whether anything has changed.

Good memory can go bad. I had a stick of Crucial
Ballistix blow out on me, and one chip went completely
nuts. And it wasn't overvolted or abused either.
When tested with memtest86+, the errors scrolled
off the screen, because each and every long-word
was bad. (One byte lane, coming out of one completely-nuts
chip, ensured a never ending scroll of errors.)
So there I had one good branded RAM (before Micron
ran into trouble), just blow up on me one day. Kablooie.
One of my first problems, was finding a DIMM pattern
in the sockets, so the machine would stay up long
enough to load memtest :-) For that problem, I
needed a GOOD DIMM in low memory, so the memtest86+
floppy could boot. Then if the BAD DIMM was up high,
after a few seconds, the test would hit that bad chip.
I had to keep flipping stuff around in the slots,
until I could get the test to start.

*******

Let's take my current machine.

One year, I put 4x2GB DDR2 in it. Tested it, all is fine.

Much later, I'm seeing problems. The problem seems to
"move" from one day to the next, as if something is loading
in a different place in RAM, with respect to a problem area.
The computer went from healthy, to almost unusable.

I finally manage to catch a memory error with memtest86+.
Adjusting Vnb this time is not helping.

Now, normally I test the sticks one at a time, so I know
exactly which one to replace. When tested individually,
or in pairs, I *cannot* detect a problem with this set of
sticks. I can only see a memory error when all four sticks
are plugged in (power or bus loading makes a difference).

I ended up replacing all four sticks, so I could be
sure of fixing it. Ran another memory test. It's clean
again.

*******

Chancea are, your analysis is sufficient, and this is
just an AV problem. But you should also run memtest86+
for peace of mind. Even letting it run for one full pass
is enough. That might take a couple hours.

When tested that way, without additional work, around
1MB of RAM is not tested. This is the E810 reserved
region. Memtest86+ asks the BIOS for info about reserved
areas, and then it's not supposed to trample on stuff
the BIOS is using. And that amounts to around 1MB or
so.

If you really want to know whether every byte is good,
you put two sticks in single channel mode (put the sticks
on the same channel), run memtest86+. Then, if it passes,
you shut down, and swap the two DIMMs in single channel
mode. This causes the high memory DIMM to become the
low memory DIMM and vice versa. The low memory DIMM
is the one that isn't fully tested. But when swapped as
the high memory DIMM, the test on that run covers everything.
You must use two sticks, to guarantee the high memory DIMM
has no reservations on it. If you insert just one stick
in the computer, and run memtest86+, then the bottom
1MB is reserved and testing is not 100% complete.

While memtest86+ comes pretty close to testing all RAM,
you have to do a little extra work if you expect complete
test coverage. I think you can see, how memory in the BIOS
area that was defective, would be a wee bit difficult
to isolate.

Paul

Interesting.

Maybe I can scout up some RAM to see if problem goes away.
John

No. Just test what you've got.

We want "proof" it's a good computer.

Paul