The CD drawer of my computer keeps opening and closing, about every 20 seconds or so. Has the computer been taken over by aliens? My 12 year old son has the theory that this is happening because we have not backed-up our files to CD and Norton 360 is alerting us to this omission on a regular basis, but we have generally been ignoring this warning. The entire computer is running fairly sluggish, so I have been considering getting someone in to “clean-up” the machine. Is this a good idea?

Even though opening and closing the CD drive drawer every 20 seconds would be an effective method to get the attention of the user to backup their files, I doubt that this is a feature of Norton 360. While I have not seen this behaviour before, such random events are generally related to either a program running on the computer which has gone partially haywire, or a virus or other malware being resident on your computer. As a starting point we will deal with the scenario of a program or process running in the background causing this behaviour. To try and narrow down this problem we will close all non-essential processes running in the background to see whether the problem stops. Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to show the Windows Task Manager window. In the window click the “Processes” tab. This will display all processes which are running on your computer (which are essentially programs running in the background). Click the “User Name” column heading to sort the processes by user name. If this heading is not visible then you may need to go to the “View” menu > “Columns” and tick “User Name”. Now all the processes should be grouped by user name. Select a process running under your user name and click “End Task”. Then, wait and see whether the problem ceases. If not, repeat the same procedure for another process and check again. Once you close a process and the problem stops you know that the most recently closed process is the one causing the problem. Write down the name of that process.

Having named the problematic process I suggest that you do some research on Google to determine the nature of that process and whether any other users are experiencing a similar problem. Of course, you are always welcome to send me the details of the process as I can also help provide advice on the best way to resolve the problem. However, if your research yields the result that the process is not critical and can be disabled then the simplest resolution would be to disable that process from loading on startup. This will stop the process from automatically loading when the computer boots. Go to the “Start” menu > “Run” and type “msconfig” (without the quotes) and click OK. In the System Configuration Utility window that appears click the “Startup” tab. This will list all the programs and processes which load on Windows startup. Untick the entry for the problematic process and click the OK button. Restart the computer and now that process should no longer load on startup. Be aware, you may receive a warning that the computer is running in Selective Startup mode. This simply means that not all processes are loading on startup (thus you are selectively starting up the computer) as you have disabled a process from loading on startup. You can safely tick the box to not display the message again and click the OK button.

However, should you find that closing all processes running under your user name does not fix the problem then I would be suspicious that there is a virus or some kind of malware installed on your computer which is causing the problem. In this situation I suggest that you update your antivirus scanner and complete a full virus scan, followed by downloading and scanning your computer with Ad-Aware Free (www.lavasoft.com), Spybot Search & Destroy (www.safer-networking.org), and Windows Defender (www.microsoft.com/downloads). That said, you did comment that your computer is running slow and you would like a clean-out of the machine. In this situation I would recommend that the best solution to both problems is to backup any data that you wish to keep and complete a clean reinstallation of Windows on the computer. This should fix the sluggish performance while also clearing any threats which have worked their way into the Windows system, assuming that any infected files are not copied across (unlikely if you only backup documents and non-program files). If you are not confident in doing this yourself then I would recommend you take the computer to a computer shop to have this done, just to make sure that you don’t lose any data accidentally during the process.