Case - A house for all computer components, sometimes even have windows and doors, but due to fire safety, they are never usually fitted with curtains.
The fan is louder and you get a strange whirling noise. The fan on your graphics card is probably giving up. The bearings are no doubt worn. I've had this problem before. Quote from BBK: “i had a noisy computer. funnily enough just giving it a good whack fixed it. wouldnt recommend it tho” Believe it or not, this did stop it for a while for me. Computers are so hard to fix
Run a disk clean up. Perhaps you have a whole load of Temp files, since the TEMP folder is located in the Windows folder, this may be the reason for it being so big.
If i'm correct that is a VMWare Virtual machine disk image. <- This may act as a restore image for your Acer OEM version of XP. Probably best to leave it. (look at the date it was created. Probably part of Acer's OEM XP for sure) As for i386 you can delete it. i386 isn't a system folder, it is a directory of where the files from when you installed XP were temporarily placed. And the random file, that can be deleted. <- The random file is also a temporary directory from when you installed Interne…
Not sure if it will help, but if you install VMWare Tools it may help. It can be found in the Tools menu I think. You need to have loaded the VM and the install will start on the VM.
Windows own built in backup utility will do this if you run a full backup first of the files folders you wish to keep check of, then an incremental (differential) backup everytime you want to backup after that.
Norton is a resource hog. AVG Free used to be good but the new versions sometimes fail to update on me. McAfee is well....you can get better ones for free. NOD32 is good but comes with a cost. Avast 4 Home Ihave never had a problem with. I have it installed on all PC's in the house (6 of them)