HDD and settings errors?

[Badram]

Hi,

I wouldve asked earlier, but I ended up being incredibly busy and never had the chance to.

The day after my last topic, I ended up having some settings crash or error, and I’m not sure if that’s negatively impacted anything.
Ive also been sometimes getting this error where windows defrag doesn’t work on my drive and im wondering if that means the drive could be dying or something or if it’s a software issue.

I’ve been doing my best to keep everything up to date, though I need to update my GPU driver, since an update came out around a week ago.

 

[Badram]

I also discovered after taking new logs that these registry items are suddenly gone for some reason, so I don’t understand if that’s maybe an FRST update, or not.

 

[Badram]

Ended up installing the GPU driver update, but I did make sure to create a restore point beforehand.

 

[Badram]

Also, I don’t know if this was a GPU issue, or a Monitor issue, but for some reason when I booted my PC my monitor displayed some text saying “can’t recognise output” but it came on just fine after windows loaded. For some reason I thought there was some kind of motherboard virus or something, but I don’t know how likely it is to get one of those.
I know it was the Monitor that was displaying the text and not the computer if that makes sense, since it was displayed the same way like if the monitor is powered on and no devices are connected it’ll say “no signal” in a grey box.
Maybe the monitor itself is dying, since I’ve noticed it’ll make more cracking noises when it powers on off, etc. I hope not, since I don’t have the money to spare for a new one at this moment.

 

[Badram]

So today, windows installed an update, but it’s also showing up as an installed program to for some reason. I don’t know if people can verify if this happened to them too.
I don’t know if it was my internet, but when I tried going to a website, it seemed like it was having trouble going to the site since it wouldn’t even load the link so I closed the browser to restart it, but it seemed like it stopped responding and wasn’t closing in the background. Firefox said there was a process running but not responding when I launched it again, and it prompted me to terminate it to restart, it worked fine after that. This hasn’t happened before so it left me concerned.
Wish computers wouldnt do stuff like this.

 

[Badram]

Weird things keep happening, like yesterday this failed to install several times In a row, until I restarted.
I also uninstalled a few steam games, and was suspicious if something was broken, and decided with FRST about an hour ago, though I fell asleep for a bit due to being tired. When I woke up, I saw the scan is still going, despite starting it an hour ago. No idea why it’s still going on when it normally takes a few minutes to complete. It’s still on Memory Info.

I don’t want to break anything, so I’ll leave it for now unless stated otherwise. Not sure if there’s a timeout point, but this shouldnt be happening and has never happened before.

 

[Badram]

Forgot to get the image of the FRST window. No idea why this is taking almost 2 hours. Maybe it’s related to Malwarebytes or something?

 

[Badram]

In hindsight, I shouldn’t have started a scan when I’m supposed to leave for an appointment in the morning, though in my defence, I didn’t anticipate running into a problem like this when it’s never happened before.

 

[DR M]

In hindsight, I shouldn’t have started a scan when I’m supposed to leave for an appointment

As you have been told several times, you shouldn't have started a scan with the specific tool at all!

You started doing the same thing you did in the other topics you opened: posting about anything you assume is weird, doing unnecessary scans with the use of powerful tools you should not use without an expert's supervision. The computer was tested several times and there is nothing to worry about. So, I'm not sure what you are asking again here.

 

[Badram]

It’s just that I’m not sure if something breaks or not, because I get these weird errors and stuff on a frequent basis, so I get extremely paranoid, I’m sorry. Posting about it is a way to vent.
The tool is still stuck scanning. I never clicked anything else, and it’s been over 3 hours now, so I don’t know what I should do and I have to leave in 20 minutes.
Honestly, I didn’t think just running scans would be an issue at all, just fixes when unsupervised.

 

[DR M]

Posting about it is a way to vent.

Yes, but the Forum is not a place where anyone can post as a way to vent. Here, people come with a computer issue, and with the help of experts the issue is resolved (or not in some cases). That is what we did for you not once, reassuring you that there is nothing wrong with your computer. You would be happy if I told you that there is a trojan causing all those "weird" things?

The tool is still stuck scanning.

Just close the program and restart the computer. Then, uninstall FRST, by renaming it to Uninstall.exe and run it.

Having said the above, if you think that there is something wrong with the computer, and you don't trust us, you can take it to a technician to check it.

 

[Badram]

I absolutely do believe what I’m told here, and I know there’s no infection. It’s just easy for me to get paranoid when stuff happens, like when the settings thing crashed, updataes fail to install, etc
Thank you for the help, I need to attend and sorry for the trouble today.

 

[DR M]

 

[Badram]

Maybe it was Malwarebytes that stopped something. It had a version update so I installed it, and have turned off the computer since I need to leave ASAP

 

[Badram]

wanted to ask a hardware question due to stuff today.
Had my computer connected to the power, but the computer itself was turned off. We ended up having a power cut for a few hours, and I was worried about damage, but everything seems to be fine since the computer was turned off, and I unplugged everything before the power came back just in case.

My question is that when I have my computer turned off but still connected to the power, should I also flip the switch at the power supply as well?
Its never been something I considered until today, mainly because power outages are pretty rare.

 

[Corrine]

My question is that when I have my computer turned off but still connected to the power, should I also flip the switch at the power supply as well?

Yes, you are correct that your computer and other electronic appliances, such as, television and microwave, should be powered off and unplugged when there is a power outage. This is to prevent damage from voltage surges when the power is restored. In fact, when the power is restored, wait a few minutes before reconnecting your computer.

 

[axe0]

It is fine to investigate errors to learn about it (but not to vent about it in a forum for help), but many questions you might have can be answered by either reading and understanding the problem or by looking it up. A great example is some of the supposed errors in this thread, the error itself explains why it occurs, e.g. "the operation requested is not supported by the hardware" when you were trying to defrag your drive. Continuing on that, there's no need for you to manually defrag or in any other way optimize your drives as Windows is perfectly capable of managing it automatically.

@DR M has mentioned it multiple times, but I'd like to additionally mention something about not using FRST or any similar tool without guidance. These tools are potentially dangerous if used incorrectly as they can cause irreparable damage, which is why you should only use them with guidance from an expert.

 

[Badram]

I’m sorry, I’ve just been extremely paranoid in regards to these things, so getting an explanation here helps. In regards to the defrag thing, I never manually execute it, so Windows does itself and I found I was getting those errors. I did look it up, but I only saw people with the same error say it may have been due to updates. Since I couldn’t find that much, I wanted to ask of the hard drive was a problem and it was dying.

I also ran into a problem today when downloading the Microsoft safety scanner tool through Firefox, as I ended up wanting to cancel since I just wanted to turn the computer off, but it either paused the download or I misclicked pause when I wanted to cancel. Afterwards it didn’t cancel, and I saw the file as a 0KB file in my downloads folder, and when I went to right click it, the folder and file explorer stopped responding and wouldn’t go back to normal. I ended up terminating the task in task manager, but that got rid of my task bar and desktop so I had to restart in order to restore it all.
After everything loaded back up, I opened Firefox, and it seemed to try and finish downloading the scanner, but I cancelled it before it could. Not sure if anything is broken or not, or how you would even check.

I only intended to write the first paragraph here, but this all ended up happening while writing, so that delayed the response a bit.

 

[Corrine]

You don't need to run the Microsoft Safety Scanner since you have Microsoft Defender and Malwarebytes installed. Additionally, Microsoft Defender updates definitions every 8 hours whereas the Microsoft Safety Scanner updates every 10 days.

 

[Badram]

Yeah, that’s why I decided against downloading it, but for some reason couldn’t cancel the download after the download itself was paused, which led to the problems I experienced.
Ive also learned that the safety scanner can pick up certain files as false positives during the scan, but determines theyre not actual threats after the MAPS report is sent at the end of the scan. It’s a bit scar though seeing the number pop up.