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Great news. Thanks for updating us with the progress. Out of interest, what did you use to copy to the new hard drive? Sounds like that part went smoothly so it would be good to know which tool you used. Was it Acronis?

Malwarebytes removes malware but is not an Anti Virus program such as MSE is an Anti Virus program.

Perhaps what you meant to say was, Malwarebytes (in the free edition) is not real-time protection. It is indeed a highly regarded anti-virus, but in the free to download version, not actively running all the time i.e. scan by request only.

HD sentinal may be good but it does cost, where the manufacturers software does not.
Is it that much better that the cost is justified?

HDSentinel may be used for free. Download the Trial edition – for our purposes here it is the same as the Professional version. I used it for some years without problem. In my case I decided to pay for it as it was useful in my work and because I am a programmer and can appreciate how much of the authors effort goes into it. Not being forced to pay makes me more likely to pay, if that makes sense.

But for the case we are talking about here, which can be a one-off usage, HDDSentinel gives access to the raw data of the S.M.A.R.T. info so you can know how many pending sector remaps, reallocated sectors and so on are on the drive. Also very clearly presented.

My only tip once you’ve installed HDDSentinel is to change the raw data to decimal instead of Hex. Not sure why it defaults to hex. Anyway just right-click the SMART table and choose Decimal data fields.

I’ve been inundated with these “returned mail” messages for about 8 weeks. I get about 500 a day.

Wow, that is the worst NDR flood I’ve ever heard of. You have our sympathy! Generally a week or two and the spammers move on to a new address. I suppose we should be thankful they at least normally do that. I take it you are using an ISP supplied email address. Now might be a good time to change to a Gmail which does tend to solve most of this. As well as eliminating the problem of changing email when moving home and getting a new ISP (which is the worst time to have to change email of course with all the hassle of moving).

Many of these are not AV apps per say, they are AM apps. There is a difference with these type apps. 2,3,4,8,11 are Anti Malware apps. The remaining are AV apps or suites that include both AV and AM components.

Ted, with the utmost respect, I think your differentiation between AM and AV is a thing of the past from when the separation between virus and spyware removal was distinct. For example do you truly believe that Malwarebytes does not remove viruses? I would be very surprised if that’s the case. It’s my go-to tool when cleaning other people’s hard drives. Removes stuff that Norton and AVG leaves behind.

Oliver,

look to your HD first (CHKDSK /R, etc) before making wholesale changes to your backup strategy

This. I find it unimaginable that Acronis would randomly “invent” disk I/O errors.

Install the free Hard Disk Sentinel from http://www.hdsentinel.com/
and you will immediately know the real state of the disk. Drives have a lot of information in them about bad sectors etc but you can’t get at it without such a program. If it’s a Western Digital drive don’t bother with their own diag program, I’ve tried it, HDDSentinel is a thousand times better.

Would you still recommend changing the drive?

Install Hard Disk Sentinel from http://www.hdsentinel.com and in the S.MA.R.T. tab, check the following rows:
Reallocated Sector Count
Current Pending Sector Count
Off-line Uncorrectable Sector Count

Oh yeah, first right-click on a row, and in the pop-up menu, select “Decimal data fields” – not sure why it defaults to hexadecimal on install.

There is a lot of data shown which can be overwhelming at first, but the overview is this:
– the “Data” field shows the value that makes sense to us, i.e. you prefer zero for those rows I mentioned.
– the “Value”, “Threshhold” and “Worst” are all scaled (usually 100 to 0, or 250 to 0) starting out with 100 being perfect and as events happen the “Value” will decrease. If they go down to “Threshold”, its a warranty event.
– should be all green ticks in the first column.

It’s a great program, it’s free, but you can pay to register if you like it.

Why not just ask your users to use headphones if the speakers are annoying others.

So you can import the data you want in the new field. Try renaming the old column in Excel to something else, and rename the new column to what it should be. Try the import again. Hopefully it will work okay.

Add a new column in Excel, before the problem one. Call it something short and simple with no spaces. Add some sample test data. See if you can pull that in as a new field in your database. If it imports, copy the contents of the problem column into the working column. Does it still work? This may give a clue as to the problem.

MS Access is your best choice.
Having said that, on close re-reading of your requirements – “generate mailing labels, create a church directory, and to have the ability to cluster individuals by shared ministries they be be involved in” – all this is very much within the scope of Word.

Word has a powerful Mail Merge facility. Experiment with its Wizard, which comes with templates for exactly such a need including Name, Address, Phone no and so on, and can be very easily added to. You can edit the “database” of recipients as a Word document, and the letter templates as other Word documents.
Either use window-face envelopes, or print labels using another template.
Anyone can easily create new outputs by copying an existing template and editing in Word.

Edit: If you need help with the Mail merge, I’m sure folk on this forum will oblige.

There are several options, PHP / MySQL being one.
Personally I prefer ASP.NET. Without much experience, ASP.NET controls can spare you much of the tedious work that goes with implementing such a task.

I would also use ASP.NET. One feature alone makes it worthwhile – when a webform goes out to the user, the user posts it back, and you return it with errors – ASP.NET keeps all the fields filled in for you. Whereas in PHP you need to re-fill each field on every round trip of the form.
Beyond that, there are such beautiful features as the ComboBox DropDown List, which works really well.

Visual Studio Express is free. I would use C# not VB because it’s no harder and really a much better designed language, it really is the best computer language in the world.

For a database, keep Access or consider Microsoft SQL Server, again the SQL Server Express is free.

Hosting is well priced – have a look at RackServers and StudioCoast for ASP.NET hosting if you don’t have your own Windows server on the net.

I had a similar problem on a system with a flaky wireless mouse. It kept interrupting the system causing it to wake up/come out of screen saver.

Thanks. That was the problem. Ours is a Microsoft Wireless Mobile Mouse 4000, and when rebooting without the receiver, the screensaver etc worked.

Found this MS support page “The screen saver does not start after you install a wireless pointing device” at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/913405
and located the suggested Optional Hardware Update “Microsoft HID Non-User Input Data Filter”. Installed that, rebooted and the NirCmd Monitor Off works, the screensaver kicks in and it goes to sleep all by itself.

Brilliant, thanks guys.
P.S. To Butchcoats: Thanks for all those tips. iTunes is running but doesn’t seem to be a problem luckily.
P.P.S. This gadget worked fine with Vista so it may be a Win7 thing?

Insufficient RAM is a likely problem, but easily fixed. Run the Task Manager (Ctrl-Shift-Esc or click Start-Run-taskmgr). Tell us two figures: Physical Memory (K) Total, and Commit Charge (K) Total.
Unless Physical exceeds Commit by a reasonable amount, say 50MB-100MB (50,000 – 100,000K), performance will suffer.

Thank you for your assistance.

You are most welcome – delighted to hear that it solved the problem.