...........is there anyone out there who may be able to help, please?

My computer is 8.5 years old so I know it's like a dinosaur and it is now pretty jam packed & slow however all I really use it for is emailing, surfing the net and storing photos.  Since Tuesday evening (I don't know if it was a font from a website I tried to download which maybe had a virus attachment?)  but the A drive (Sorry I don't use technical jargon) has an intermittent green light flash on it and it sounds like it is about to start up, this is in 10 second intervals.

When I switch on and after I sign in, my front page now has missing short cut icons from it. I now have to connect to Broadband by clicking on Start, then Connect to rather than just clicking on the Wanadoo Broadband icon.  I bring my emails in through Mozilla Thunderbird, well on Wednesday when I tried to open it, it just kept putting up Crash Reports to send through.  So I have had to load Thunderbird whenever I want to view my emails and its gone back to using an older version of Thunderbird. If I look at Facebook, I can't really reply to any comments and it won't let me look at older posts.

I went to System Restore to go back to a date and see if that helped but all it shows is November 2010, no other month to go back too (I'm using Windows XP, forgot to add that!).  I'm sure there's something else, as if this isn't enough, but I can't remember it at the moment.

Or should I buy an external hard drive (Tesco's have them for just under £40) copy all photos & files I want to keep and then dig the factory settings disc out of the box, blow the dust off and see if that works?

Christine if I was you I'd use the last option. Too many problems, too old a computer (I've never had one longer than 2 years!) so if you copy everything important to an external hard drive and go back to factory settings, you will have the best chance of success.

Agreed, my old desktop is about the same age as yours Christine, I do a complete clean restore every year or so and that keeps it whizzing along. Also it's always a good idea to back up all your photos anyway in case the pc does just die one day.

Thats got me thinking, My PC is about 4 years old and the boys are forever moaning at how slow it is. So the job for today is to get all my stuff off it onto discs!!!! Only been saying that for the last 14 weeks while on the sick LOL
Then I will be asking HOW to do a complete restore :) :)
Lea :)

My computer is five years old, and I did that last year, got an external hard drive copied everything and had a computer buff Friend wipe it and reinstall.

It will probably be fine now until next year.

He says with the upgrades i have I am driving a porche with a 1200 engine, really need a better processor.

BTW, typo -I meant to say 3 years, not 2, Groan.

my hubby builds comp but he isnt here I will show him your email and see what he says..

>> My computer is 8.5 years old

Ours is older than that.. lol.. Major problems with ours.. Good luck with sorting out your problem.
OUrs has been cleaned out etc and it makes no difference..

Do you delete cookies everytime, run adaware, Norton, Defrag? We just had where our puter went into safe mode and ran a debug thing on it- so much faster now :-) Ours is prob close to 7yrs old... Think I want a Mac for our next puter...

Our 'beast' is 10 years old!!!

A couple of weeks ago we had it cleaned by a computer expert friend.  We bought an external HD and saved all important stuff first.

Running good now, but the graphics card is on the way out and it takes f  o  r  e  v  e  r  to show anything on the monitor at start up.

Our more immediate problem is that our Scanner Drivers 'disappeared' a while ago and we can't find the original disc (OH in the attic as I type)  I need it urgently and it looks as if we'll have to get a new one tomorrow :( 

reboot the computer and press f8 key just after the bios screen disappears black screen will appear  with an options list , select  safe mode , desk top will appear large because it is not using all your drivers (and viruses) when in desk top safe mode try a system restore  via the control panel it will hopefully give options before November. If not its due to a virus and will need reformatting.
If your photos are stored on drive C they will need saving or you will loose them,  see if you have more than one hardrive in the computer ? if the photos are saved on a second harddrive in the system and not on drive C: the computer can be reformatted without loosing them.
The problem you are having is a virus or malware thats what is preventing you using the system restore on a normal boot.

If you are not sure what you are doing back up what you want to save before anything else.

external drive is always handy for backing up photos / documents anyway so its not a waste of money.

From my computer hubby HTH

Roni

Thanks everyone.  I downloaded SpyBot and it detected 53 files (Malware, Adware etc) which have now been removed, it's not running perfectly BUT a whole lot better....Facebook I'm back!  I've been given something else to download and try too. 

I have Avast as my virus protection & Windows Defender.