just ran chkdsk in command-prompt.... C:\chkdsk at the end, it displayed "CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the volume bitmap. Windows found problems with the file system. Run CHKDSK with the /F (fix) option to correct these". "discovered free space marked as allocated in the volume bitmap" >>> what does that mean ?? and should i now go run CHKDSK /F and everything will be hunky dory ?? thanks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQuJnnQuPWM&mode=user&search= Rob, Central Coast NSW Australia

PS NTFS file system http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQuJnnQuPWM&mode=user&search= Rob, Central Coast NSW Australia

Before running again go to Disk Management in WinXP and look at how the drive is setup. NTFS automatically reserves 8MB of space at the beginning of the drive. Leave that alone.

Disk Management shows my 3 partitions (c e f) as healthy ntfs. don't know what else to look for in there OTH originally when i ran chkdsk from command prompt in windows, i did have a program running at the time minimised to taskbar that i had forgot about....perhaps the reason for the original error notice (??). shut that open program down, ran chkdsk again and it was all clear. schedualled to run chkdsk on restart before it loads XP and all clear. got into desktop, ran chkdsk in commmand prompt again and it showed the same error notice again (as i have typed above) think i'm getting paranoid.... EDIT: nothing wrong with the PC in general, but have noticed its slowwww in opening web pages the last 2 days. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQuJnnQuPWM&mode=user&search= Rob, Central Coast NSW Australia

Run spyware removal tools.

""CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the volume bitmap. Windows found problems with the file system. Run CHKDSK with the /F (fix) option to correct these". "discovered free space marked as allocated in the volume bitmap" >>> what does that mean ?? and should i now go run CHKDSK /F and everything will be hunky dory ??"" If Windows shut down unexpectedly because the computer crashed or you shut off the computer before Windows had shut down properly, etc., etc., it's common for the free space figure to be incorrect when chkdsk checks it, and running chkdsk /f fixes the problem and all is "hunky dory" 99.99% of the time. If it's caused by a faulty hard drive, that's another matter - if you suspect thwe hard drive might be starting to fail, Check your hard drive with the manufacturer's diagnostics. See the latter part of response 1 in this: http://www.computing.net/windows95/... ... "Before running again go to Disk Management in WinXP and look at how the drive is setup. NTFS automatically reserves 8MB of space at the beginning of the drive. Leave that alone." You can't change that in XP itself in any case if it's already there, at least you can't make it any less than ~ 8mb - and chkdsk never makes a comment about that - it knows XP puts that there by default.