[vikingal]

Hello there!!,
Back in the Malware forum The help was great . All spyware problems solved..

I do have a couple of hardware issues for this forum.

1) The little amber light on the front of the computer has been glowing steady for weeks now whenever the comp. is on. It used to only blink occasionally. What to do????

2) How often should one defrag?? Should I try another type of defrag program other than the standard os one.

3) I have a cd-r and a dvd recorder on my comp..(sony vaio), the dvd does not show up in "my computer" and once in a while the cd-r disappers from "my computer" also. If I go to device manager and "scan for new hardware", the cd-r returns, but the dvd is still absent.

Please advise,
Thank you

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Hi there

1) When you say 'amber light', I assume you mean the Hard Drive activity light, right? If so, then this means that the system is constantly accessing the hard drive. This can be caused by a number of things including :
A badly fragmented drive
A failing drive
Too little memory (RAM)
Too many applications running at once

2) How often you need to defrag the drive depends on how often you uninstall programs or delete files from it. If you have just uninstalled several programs or deleted a lot of data, then you should run defrag afterwards. Otherwise, you should only need to defrag once every couple of months. You can use other defragging programs instead of Windows defrag if you wish, but whichever you use, stick to that one.

3) Is your missing DVD-RW drive listed in Device Manager? (Look in the CDROM section of device manager)

[Samm]

Hi there

1) When you say 'amber light', I assume you mean the Hard Drive activity light, right? If so, then this means that the system is constantly accessing the hard drive. This can be caused by a number of things including :
A badly fragmented drive
A failing drive
Too little memory (RAM)
Too many applications running at once

2) How often you need to defrag the drive depends on how often you uninstall programs or delete files from it. If you have just uninstalled several programs or deleted a lot of data, then you should run defrag afterwards. Otherwise, you should only need to defrag once every couple of months. You can use other defragging programs instead of Windows defrag if you wish, but whichever you use, stick to that one.

3) Is your missing DVD-RW drive listed in Device Manager? (Look in the CDROM section of device manager)

[Neil Jones]

1) If the light is on permantely even when the system isn't in use (ie switched on) then this indicates an issue wit the board. otherwise its a sign of a system that needs more memory.

2) Defrag should be run regularly, preferably weekly but nobody in their right mind will stick to it so I suggest monthly, bi-monthly or even quarterly.

3) Is it external? Could be a caddy problem.