Edit: I'm trying to restore my computer to the factory settings but it wont let me. When I boot from the XP CD it says there is no drive installed that is compatable. Anyone ever had this problem?


I havent had an anti-virus on my computer for over a year and I have so muchbad crap on here. What is the best anti-virus? I know the main two are McCaffee (sp?) and Norton but I always see mixed reviews about them, plus my computer doesnt have a big enough CPU or enough RAM to run smoothly with those. Is anyone having a better experience with anything else?

 

AVG is free and works great. Stands for Anti-Virus Grisoft or something. I used it before my college resident networkrequired that I useSymantec. Pretty much all scanners are going to be big resource hogs, but AVG tends not to have a lot of the bloated GUI stuff that others have.

 

Yeah AVG is really good also why dont u just reformat ur HD and which xp do u have?

 

Mcafee is a piece of crap. Nod32 is supposed to be real good. get "Adaware" too, it scans your computer for adware and show you what to get rid of. I use it often and love it.

 

I'm pretty sure its SP2 home edition. I've tried to reformat but it always fails. I dont really have the funds to take it to a repair shop right now

 

What do you mean it fails? If you are going to reformat, completly delete the partition first. Make sure you are deleting the correct partition if you have more than 1 hard drive or more than 1 partition. It should then show you that you have _______MB unpartitioned space. Create a partition in this space then install XP on the partition. When exactly does the reformat fail? How are you reformatting? Windows installation is pretty straight forward, if installation of the OS is failing, its possible you hard drive is bad but not always the case.

 

Sounds like bad HDD. Visit newegg for a replacement. PM me if you need some phone tech support. I would be happy to help.

 

For virus protection you might look at webroot as well. I work at staples in electronics. I would definitely go with webroot over anything else, it catches alot of stuff that norton doesn't and the files for it are alot smaller therefore does not take as much to run.

 

How could my HDD be bad when I'm using it right now? I only have one in my setup. By fail I mean that when its preparing to boot XP from my disk, I get an error message saying there is no compatable drive. Even if I try to reinstall it by running the disk while XP is already up and restarting it does the same thing

 

Ok so u do get threw the partion stage and xp installs but wont boot up? What type of PC do u have because it should work also just so u know xp sp2 requires u to re-register ur OS in 30 days so make sure u have all u need.