This is weird (framerates)

[garymbuska]

Rotty Daddy I could be wrong but if you indeed have a bad sector somewhere than the operating system will automatcially make a note of the bad address and not use it. If you search your hard drive there is a error log that windows makes upon start up not sure of the name of the file but  you should find a entry about bad sectors there if you have any and you can only have so many before the drive becomes unuasable. It depends  on the size of the drive as to how many you can have.
Most sofware programs will let you know if it had a problem with writing to the hard drive but some may not.
Doing a surface scan can be a very long task esp if you have a huge hard drive say 120 gig or so. It would probably take the better part of a morning to do a surface scan on that big of a hard drive.
As for using defrag I have heard yeah and neah to that.
I have heard it can cause the loss of some files and make some programs not work right at all.  While others say it can help speed up some tasks.
What I do is I have a extra hard drive that I do not use untill I want to preform a cleanup I then copy all of my files from one drive to the other this way it puts them in order without any huge gaps in between. Do the defrag then copy the files back. STRANGE I agree but this is what I do and have not had any problems.

[chomp_rock]

You say spybot does a good enough job compared to MS antispyware

You're kidding yourself, all tests you can find online show that MS antispyware trounces spybot and I've purposely infected my laptop with a fixed number of spyware/adware progs and spybot missed a bunch, MS got them all!

You also need an antivirus program, Firefox does not protect you enough that you can just not have an antivirus app.  I've seen people's computers totally hosed because of that belief.  

[beaky]

You say spybot does a good enough job compared to MS antispyware

You're kidding yourself, all tests you can find online show that MS antispyware trounces spybot and I've purposely infected my laptop with a fixed number of spyware/adware progs and spybot missed a bunch, MS got them all!

You also need an antivirus program, Firefox does not protect you enough that you can just not have an antivirus app.  I've seen people's computers totally hosed because of that belief.  

I'll heed that advice... thanks.
Good news: I tried deleting the FS9 .cfg again, and it seems to have fixed the problem... go figure.