TSGL: XP pro - Now HDD continued problems

[Tilman Brandl]

Hi,

I'm not getting happy with my new PC - bought in Nov 07, applied a fresh 
install of XP prp sp2 - since then there's trouble.

***** Question: CAN any kind of 'standard' software (if there is such thing) 
damage my machine's HDDs ?


That's all I want to know just now, the rest is for the curious of you, and 
not the faint at heart ;-)
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I'm asking the above, because I'm running into a new (or old) problem nearly 
each day.

- XP Firewall is getting set to OFF after reboot
- can't install different programs - last one was BitDefender
- machine reboots a few times each day, asks to run chkdsk afterwards and 
sometimes finds/repairs defective entries + indices on system + program 
partitions
- errors show up in taskbar: "...file xxxxxx corrupt: Run chkdsk to repair 
.... " saw it a few times, sometimes it stopped an installation. This is the 
first time I've EVER seen those

What I've done:
* Ran chkdsk on all drives,
* Sofar I've been running AVG free with updated definitions nearly each day, 
rarely was there anything worth mentioning, and what was found were mostly 
old finactive files somewhere stored away in a .zip or such.

A while ago I had lots of reboots, which stopped after I tweaked a 
timings-setting in Bios (w/o really knowing WHAT to tweak)

In the works:
Currently I'm running a thorough check with adaware - a first smart scan 
only found 2 old favorites, marked as malware (removed it) and the usual 
collection of tracking cookies (left them)

Will do more checks, if I can install another antivirus program.

I really wónder if this all is normal windows trouble, a 3rd-party software 
thing (any drivers...) or actually hardware related, like my old Sata-HDD 
dying (this one isn't old, just 1/2 year at max). The second Sata-HDD is 
brand new
<sigh>

Tilman