Hi Phoenix and all

My PC goes on when I wake up each morning and is warming up while I make a cup of tea. It stays on all day, regardless of weather we're home or not, and goes off last at night.

This routine happens every day, except when we are on holiday.

I do a Disk Cleanup about twice a week and a Defrag set for every Wednesday morning at ten o'clock while I'm at the Local Residence coffee club.

I run Kasperski anti-virus and also use Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware regularly, and Secunia PSI which warns of security threats from missed up-dates to programs that I have installed, such at Adobe Flash Player and JavaScript.

So, as you see, I've been quite thorough.

I pay a maintenance fee with PC World for such as this. I bought the computer from them in Feb 2007 and this will be the first service it's getting. I had loads of trouble at first and PC World staff were great.

It was the new Windows Vista installed and the machine kept crashing. We didn't know if it was the machine or the operating system that was causing it - turned out to be Vista because after they brought out a Service Pack it never gave me any more trouble.

Till now that is, and I suspect Apple's iTunes program is the cause, but I'm taking the precaution of checking it out. Why not - I pay for it; I should get my money's worth.

Now, Sheila's laptop's another thing, entirely. We carted that across the Atlantic and back, on holiday. Now she can't play her card games. We think we shook a graphics card into submission.

We shall see...

Sheila and Barry      

Hi Barry, you have a point regarding  ' iTunes ' I have thought for sometime that the application will considerably slow a Windows PC down.

The simple answer is that iTunes is an AppleMac programme,  It is optimized to run on their OS X. It is just ported to run on Windows. It is not optimized to run on Windows and so after every update done it gets increasingly slower.
Apple understandably make no effort to make it run faster on Windows.They do a similar thing with the Safari browser and the Quicktime player, they are all a bit bloated and require a lot of resources .

This and a lot of other things will all contribute to a slow PC but will not I think be the reason for your noisy HD.

lmao mate,i just deleted my cookies,,and yes,spent ages looking for my passwords.

If it will help, there are two types of cookie that you will encounter.

The Session cookies are only temporary and are erased automatically when you close your Browser.

The Persistent or stored cookies will remain on your hard drive until they expire or you erase them yourself. This type of cookie recognises that you've visited a site before.

Cookies cannot create a virus or harvest any, what they will do is help keep your online transactions secure. This is done by storing your sign in details temporarily using a session cookie and enable you to access previously saved quotations.
They should also automatically sign you out of the service after 10 minutes of inactivity for security purposes.

To make life easier you may choose to have your username saved on your computer so that you don't have to enter it every time you use a service, forums like this often do.
By selecting the option 'Remember my username', your username will be automatically entered every time you access the service. In order for the site to remember your username, they need to store it on your computer using a cookie.
It goes without saying that one must never use that facility on a public computer.

Hi Phoenix,  AVG detects cookies with a Warning level and certainly does quarrantine them. However,  these files are harmless in themselves, but they could be used by a real virus infection to create a profile of you and other actions.
I would suggest using the latest free AVG version, I think it is 9.2.57.0
One of the issues of earlier versions was that it saw a lot of genuine applications as a potential threat as indeed with the already mentioned cookies.
You can if you wish also set AVG Free to not detect cookies on your computer.

If you have got into the very good habit of clearing everything out once a day then I would say keep on doing that, it certainly is a good habit to be into.

Last month about this time, I had the 'pleasure' of getting used to my new laptop ?? This week, my printer decided it was time to packup ?? Yep! now I have an Epson 3 in 1 and have I been enjoying myself, in trying to get used to How to find what I want  not exactly fun, but i shall get there with use.