How can i besure it's a hack or virus

I've been curious of this a while. My comp gives me trouble daily, I've come to accept that as a personality quirk of a sort. But I wonder, with only a little security on my comp and access to the internet, how can I be sure which problem are compy being stupid and how many are viruses and hackers messy around.

Example: My internet is crap speed, I've call sympatico (ISP) a bunch of times and after many other excusses they now claim that it has something to do with my computer. I"m curious if it's something simple like a crappy pair of usb ports or more complex like a virus i can't detect.

Any sujestions would be much appreciated.

If you have an uptodate virus scanner, by that I mean a newish version of Norton/Mcaffee and keep it up to date by going to the vendors web site and downloadin the latest DAT files (virus definitions) run a full system scan all files all drives. It should show up any viruses you have hidding as well as picking up torjans and back door programs.

Is there anything specific that causes your comp to crash? by the way if you could say what opperating system you are using it would help.

WaveRebel

ps I am not saying other virus scanners can't do the job, I just have experience with those two.

More info is needed, as wavrebel said. Do you leave your computer on for long periods of time, do you do regular maintainance such as defrag, cleaning out windows or a simple disc scan? What version are you using? 98/2000/xp? Have you updated the drivers on your modem?
What are you calling crappy speeds?

Sorry, i'll try to fill in the missing info.
OS: Win98
I turn off regularly, defrag regularly, scan disc regularly, I've reinstalled my modem drivers and got and new modem with new drivers lately.
Crappy: Almost uselessly slow. Paying highspeed but getting a troughput of 573* K (checked at toast.net). I'm pretty sure i should get almost twice that.

What's your connection ?

For.ex. I have a 4 Megabyte line, but actually throughput is about 500Kbit/s.
You'll always have to devide the * Byte/s by 8 to get a an apporximate *bit/s throughput.
It's the *bits/s that really count. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Btw, I think a 500Kbit/s is pretty fast, faster as most of the members here, I'm sure.

That's right.

then why donot you try to fix your chache to one standard size, so that fragmentation of the swap file reduces

add the following to the system.ini under [vcache]

MinCacheSize=12288
MaxCacheSize=12288
ChunkSize=12288
add the above code if you have ram above 128 MB.

try different values around this if you didnot feel the spped still, by writing the values of multiple of 1024.

I mean, multiply 1024 with 12, I had written 12288, like that change the number to 11 and write, the corresponding value there and observe for sometime, you may find the response.

here chunksize, is to improve the multimedia performance
other two mincachesize and maxcachesize is for the fixing of cache size

Have you scanned your ports ? and what did it tell you ?
Sometimes i did confuse either with those things .. virus or beeing hacked ?
Everytime i finish my connection from the internet i swept and scaned my Drive to make sure that nothing get inside my computer. And Shrekkie was right about that, 500 oo fast .. me only 126 .

;)

How do i scan my prots, and what would it tell me?

I would highly reccomend you download AVG in my oppinion it is the best free virus scan about and if you have a virus I am sure this will detect just give it a try it will be worth it just click on the link below for more info

http://www.grisoft.com/html/us_downl.htm#FREE
PS some positive antipoints would be nice

If you scan your ports, the port scanner could tell you if any suspicious connection exists on your PC. For example, a nice little port scanner i was using few months ago (i can't remember the name of it) has its database with some trojans and the ports they were using, if any of the suspicisious port was open or "active". It could block the port or monitor the connection while it was trying to close the connection. Many port scanners are on the web just search on e.x. Google for port scanners. [the link of the search].
A firewall could be also very useful. e.x. Tiny Firewall, Norton Internet Security and many other.