I know this might be a bit vague, for lack of a better word, but I'm really curious about Windows in general. Is it really such a bad operating system that major breakdowns are just to be expected? Seems I'm dealing with a lot of problems that keep me baffled - like having files and folders get corrupted, seemingly out of nowhere. Through the years I know I've posted a question several times about mp3's coming up with file sizes intact but a 0 bitrate shown when I go to play them. I never have gotten a working answer on that one. Now, lately, I'm getting scores of pictures that suddenly either won't open at all or that are partially corrupted, showing only a portion of the original. I'm also looking at a LOT of unrecoverable errors when I do chkdsks in DOS, and wind up having to convert folders to files. These problems aren't drive specific, meaning they're showing up on many different drives. They don't appear to be virus related either - I'm about as careful as you can be when it comes to grabbing stuff online and I scan with my A/V and things like Ad-Aware and Pest Patrol daily.
So what gives? Is this normal? Are there steps to protecting my files that I'm overlooking? Or do I have to start from scratch and learn Linux and/or Mac to keep things intact?

I love Humanity - It's the people I can't stand

This type of corruption likely has more to do with transmission errors or a bad file to begin with than anything to do with your PC.

I would guess a bad hard drive controller, bad memory a screwy mb or even a bad cable.

Larry

Sometimes I think I understand everything, then I regain consciousness

I'm with seawatch.

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If at first you don't succeed, you're about average.

M2

Best run a MEMTEST - I once had just one bad module of 64MB (back in the days!) and was constantly experiencing corruption errors and blue screen crashes. With a simple run of MEMTEST, it was obvious why, as there was error after error at literally every memory address!

If it's not that, i'd also agree that the hard drive is surely on it's way out.