Cheers exec will give it a try.

Oh I meant to say ... I couldn't untick anything in the Spybot SD resident thingie the other day. So sites are still a bit slow on the upload.

On the other hand, in the last week or two, I know of at least 3 people, including Mr Grumpy, who have had to deal with naughty Trojan attacks, inspite of router firewalls, McAfee, AVG and I can't remember what else.

Anyway, the other thing is, I want another stand-alone jobbie (alongside my 'orrible Vista). Any suggestions please? As in simple?

Tell Mr Grumpy not to open emails with attachments, getting plenty of dangerous ones here every day.

No it wasn't that - on one of my rare visits to work (as in today) he showed me. It was a simple product search on Google last week, very nasty. The other 2 were friends, one of whom I would imagine was via email, apparently half of UKOnline was affected by the Philippines. He's registered privately now.

Why people live with all these attacks I really don't know, why don't you just get a Mac and have done with It?

ED: Should have said something like "at the moment" at the end..don't want to tempt fate -):

'cos if nearly everyone had Macs the virus writers would start writing them for Macs...

The dodgy attachment thing is made more difficult by people who insist on sending ten lines of text as a Microsoft Word document (attachment) instead of simply putting the information in the body of the email. Or, if it's a real document, sending it as a PDF.

The worst offenders are employment agencies who insist on sending me CVs as Word Docs. And another Word Doc with their ludicrous fee schedule and Ts & Cs.

Maybe I should just engage in guerilla warfare and keep sending them back with 'only PDFs accepted'.

There is actually at least one virus which comes in PDFs, though it only affects unpatched installations of Adobe Acrobat, normally businesses...

My ODL MT4 on my desktop running XP updated to 218 ok. But my laptop running Vista updated Alpari MT4 ok but the ODL upgrade keeps failing. Everytime I open ODL i get a message to say it will upgrade but nothing happens. I use AVG and turned off the firewall but still didnt work.

Try closing the main program once the upgrade box pops up, Jeffie, and then press the start button to upgrade.

Kayak, I was replying to chocolate's concerns above my post and not "nearly everyone".

I desperately need to try and speed up my PC. Running Marketmaker, Level 2 and am is near impossible now. It never used to be a problem and the computer is never used for games, downloads or pretty much anything except trading and a little word processing. Can anyone suggest what may be wrong please?
I have broadband and 18.6 GB of free disk memory.

Disk space isn't the important thing generally, but RAM is. If you have less than 2Gb these days, you haven't got enough, especially if you're blessed with Vista. Somehing else that will cause performance to decay (on disk traffic) is fragmentation of files on the disk which occurs over time. It may be worth defragmenting the disk.

Thanks MM, how do I find out how much RAM I have. Sorry for the basic questions!
edit. just found it, it seems I have only 512 MB of RAM.mmm must be the problem then I guess. New computer then :-((

Control panel / system.

It's all there.

And let me know how you defraggle please splat.
I've tried it several times and given up. There are no cute little squares and I've no idea if anything's actually happening!

Splat

Got to Crucial. They have an online scanner that will check your computer and reccomend an upgrade. They will also tell you how to fit it. If your computer will support it, go for 3GB total.

I find that Crucial are close to the cheapest memory suppliers, and their quality and service is first class.

Splat

In the first place and from what I've read, you sound like an ideal candidate to run those applications using Google Chrome as your browser, instead of Internet Explorer.

Extra RAM would be extremely beneficial too but I'd try GC in the meantime.

I endorse Optimist's advice re Crucial.

Depending on your machine's configuration, you may have to discard the 512Mb of memory you already have and replace it with 2x1Gb sticks. This will be a lot cheaper than a new machine and will make an enormous difference to performance. Incidentally, what OS are you running -- Windows XP?

Choccie:

To defragment:

Start->My Computer-> right-click on C:->Properties-> Tools Tab ->Defragment now

Chocopops,

Go to the Auslogics website and download their defraggler. It defraggles the fraggles that other defragglers can't reach.