Thread: Portable external hardrives

As a basic only understander of pc magic, can I assume the external drives only store data, and don't have the standard MS Office type programs installed as well ie you still need to have a halfway decent pc and software to make everything work at reasonable speeds?

Yes they only store data be it music, videos documents or what ever

I do have decent computers its just my laptop is on its way out

You might be interested in this recent study by "Backblaze" who run an online storage business -they only buy consumer standard HDDs for their storage "pods" and their selection is generally based on whatever they can get for the cheapest price...we're talking a sample size here of over 25,000 HDDs where the failure interval from day 1 of service was logged for each drive. Backblaze Blog » What Hard Drive Should I Buy?

FWIW it makes for interesting reading

Update on my slow computer that I think is dying

so I think I may of possibly found what my issue is...

I have AVG flag some Malware on my computer....I have obviously downloaded something somewhere and found a program called search and protect (which I didnt download)

this also appeared to be attached to an exe file from Mozilla firefox so I'm wondering whether it has come in through that...

So I have a question now AVG has quarantined all the files (11) all have been healed and deleted ba 1 (which it hasnt been able to heal so has remained isolated in the vault) which I can only assume is possibly hidden somewhere in the system processes, but because its in the AVG vault its my understanding it wont cause any further issues.

My question is now....

am I safe to move all my files I want to back up on to my external storage?
would it be best to have AVG scan the folders (photos and documents) I want to send over before sending?

once i have sent them I'm considering reinstalling windows. (if I can work out how to do it)

I have rolled back my computer, removed mozilla and replaced with Chrome and also removed all files I could find in relation to that software that I didnt (to my knowledge) download.

I also went on another computer and changed my bank password just in case.

I just want to know about the backed up files....from what I could see from AVG (free version as my AVG paid run out about 2 months ago, yeah I know stupid)

I couldn't see that any of the files it removed were linked to my photos or anything..I just don't want to send them over to the cloud and risk sending something nasty to another computer if the other computer goes to access them.

am I safe to do it?

Originally Posted by AndyG

Going back to the symptoms is your virus software up to date and have you done a full scan? Plus a defrag of the drive ?
Regardless of the above get a backup device,

I got a 3 tb sea gate, very happy and my movie library is growing rapidly.
Regards
Andrew

Hate to be a smarty pants, but Always check the obvious first.

No your right Andy

I don't claim to be an expert...when it comes to computers.

I still had active antivirus, I have used avg free for years and never had an issue in fact this is the first virus issue I have had and it this is the first year that I had paid antivirus on this laptop in nearly 5years ironically.

Lesson learnt.

Hopefully I can resolve it.

Ah we all get burnt at times, no single virus product will work 100% of the time, and occasionally they will sneak through, despite the best defenses.

I'm finding nowadays USB ports are the spawn of the devil

Dullbird,
I would be:
Making sure my virus software is up to date
Do a full scan (of entire PC )
Empty the vault if you can
Go through control panel and look for anything strange & delete it. (Check the name with Google for some background)
Make sure no free toolbars have attached themselves, but you just did a new Chrome so that should be fine.
Run a registry cleaner (CCleaner freeware is pretty good)
Restart the PC
Redo a full virus scan,
Scan any USB or other attachable devices.
I would now be confident my machine is as clean as possible


I would not re install Windows if i could avoid it

Good Luck
Andrew