Slow Computer

[Kcm3000]

my comp is wiked slow. its a few years old, and how do u clean this bad boy up to make it a little peppier lol. any suggestions would be appreciated. thanks guys/gals.

 

[SwoleTexasKid]

Do you have a firewall/antivirus program? How bout a spyware scanner?

How much ram do you have? You can upgrade that for more speed.

I really need a lot more info to help you bro.

 

[Kcm3000]

yeah i have a fire wall a virus scan. not sure about the ram. how do i check that?

 

[SwoleTexasKid]

Right Click on My Computer and select properties. A screen will come up showing your computers stats.

Post your processor speed (It will be in Gig ex:: 2.4 Gig)

And your ram (it will be in mb ex: 512mb)

 

[Kcm3000]

1.40 ghz
512 mb of ram

is that good or bad lol

 

[Dave_19]

It has nothing to do with the specs of your computer. Your computer should never just "slow down" from old age. that isn't possible. Its a software problem (infected w/ spyware & virus's probably) Try this, run any scanner out there, go here for example: **broken link removed** run a free scan.. is it finding any thing? If so, there is your problem. How do you get rid of all those infections? Well as an Avg Joe your best bet is to Back up all your files and re-install the operating system. Other then that you can try to run every Anti-virus/Anti-spyware app you can your hands on one at a time to see if that does the trick, it probably won't catch every thing. But as a technician that has been doing this daily for over 2yrs I can tell you with todays infections, after running my main 15 scanners, about 50% of the time the machines are still infected, in which case I will start a manual removal of each infection one a time usually involving deleting DLL's, regkeys, process's, services, BHO's, and random created directories.

 

[Baseline]

It has nothing to do with the specs of your computer. Your computer should never just "slow down" from old age. that isn't possible. Its a software problem (infected w/ spyware & virus's probably) Try this, run any scanner out there, go here for example: **broken link removed** run a free scan.. is it finding any thing? If so, there is your problem. How do you get rid of all those infections? Well as an Avg Joe your best bet is to Back up all your files and re-install the operating system. Other then that you can try to run every Anti-virus/Anti-spyware app you can your hands on one at a time to see if that does the trick, it probably won't catch every thing. But as a technician that has been doing this daily for over 2yrs I can tell you with todays infections, after running my main 15 scanners, about 50% of the time the machines are still infected, in which case I will start a manual removal of each infection one a time usually involving deleting DLL's, regkeys, process's, services, BHO's, and random created directories.

Dave, Bro the main problem with people these days is that they don't realize that computers require maintenance. Cleaning you Cache is the easiest thing you can do to free up some extra RAM. What boggs down most computer is the lack of RAM. They have 9million things running in their system tray and they have never cleaned their Cache since the computer was bought! lol As far as Spyware goes. Spybot S&D is effective but like you said the trojans of today are pretty fucking tricky so that will not do alone. I use Spybot S&D, Adaware SE, AVG anti-virus, and Regsupreme (to clean out all the invalid registry keys).


-Baseline

 

[Kcm3000]

i have 3 spyware things that run throughout the day, they erase the same 10-15 applications eachtime. do i have too many programs on my computer if it is that slow, or do i just have some virus?

 

[Dave_19]

Dave, Bro the main problem with people these days is that they don't realize that computers require maintenance. Cleaning you Cache is the easiest thing you can do to free up some extra RAM. What boggs down most computer is the lack of RAM. They have 9million things running in their system tray and they have never cleaned their Cache since the computer was bought! lol As far as Spyware goes. Spybot S&D is effective but like you said the trojans of today are pretty fucking tricky so that will not do alone. I use Spybot S&D, Adaware SE, AVG anti-virus, and Regsupreme (to clean out all the invalid registry keys).


-Baseline

Those are all good programs, I prefer Nod32, avast over AVG, Mcafee makes TERRIBLE retail software along with Symantec, they are both the most bloated, but Mcaffee has some good command line scanners, and corpoorate anti virus. For spyware, adaware, spybot, spy sweeper, ewido, spyware Dr, and bitdefender are all good, many have free scanners or trials you can run. One thing I will say is most computers that still have virus's left or spyware after I run every scanner I can get my hands on, usually are infected with new infections, Look2me, Vundo, Virtumonde, Zlob, Ace-X,to name a few are very tough to get rid of with out manual removal.

 

[Dave_19]

i have 3 spyware things that run throughout the day, they erase the same 10-15 applications eachtime. do i have too many programs on my computer if it is that slow, or do i just have some virus?

Thats too much security software, to be honest I don't have any security software at all and my windows firewall is disabled. I just bought my mother a laptop for xmas, so for a mother I installed Nod32 by it self on there, left the firewall on, pop up blocker through IE on, left windows defender on, and downloaded firefox, she should be fine. A good anti-virus & Anti-spyware together is all you need. But this is only on a CLEAN machine, not one thats already infected.

 

[Kcm3000]

thanks dave.

 

[SwoleTexasKid]

1.40 ghz
512 mb of ram

is that good or bad lol

Thats an older system its gonna be somewhat slow.

You could upgrade to a gig of ram for increased speed.

 

[alan1973]

Dave, Bro the main problem with people these days is that they don't realize that computers require maintenance. Cleaning you Cache is the easiest thing you can do to free up some extra RAM. What boggs down most computer is the lack of RAM. They have 9million things running in their system tray and they have never cleaned their Cache since the computer was bought! lol As far as Spyware goes. Spybot S&D is effective but like you said the trojans of today are pretty fucking tricky so that will not do alone. I use Spybot S&D, Adaware SE, AVG anti-virus, and Regsupreme (to clean out all the invalid registry keys).


-Baseline

additionally, running defrag every week or so help along with disk-cleanup.
Also, if you are running XP, 512MB of ram is fine, but I would move up to 1 GB.
many newer programs are requiring 1.5-2.0GHz processors at the least. may want to consider upgrading.
also, you never stated a laptop or a desktop.
if your CPU is getting maxed out, find the process that is hogging it and find out if you need it. If you don't, get rid of it, if you can't get rid of it you should probably use "HijackThis" at the least to get more info.

 

[Kcm3000]

yeah laptop sry. do people out there have desktops still??? just kidding. but yeah the computer is a little old like 4-5 years. almost done with school then ill get a new one or sumthign. thanks again

 

[Baseline]

Those are all good programs, I prefer Nod32, avast over AVG, Mcafee makes TERRIBLE retail software along with Symantec, they are both the most bloated, but Mcaffee has some good command line scanners, and corpoorate anti virus. For spyware, adaware, spybot, spy sweeper, ewido, spyware Dr, and bitdefender are all good, many have free scanners or trials you can run. One thing I will say is most computers that still have virus's left or spyware after I run every scanner I can get my hands on, usually are infected with new infections, Look2me, Vundo, Virtumonde, Zlob, Ace-X,to name a few are very tough to get rid of with out manual removal.

I agree, I was helping my cousin reformat his computer. Well, It was hijacked so bad that it was not even worth it for me to fix for him. They got into his registry and browser and had a field day...lol But I believe "SMITFRAUD" was the culprit. That was a tricky one for me because nowadays they hide behind your system resources. So in reality it masks itself as a system32 file or an executable .exe to trick your PC to thinking hey I'm a file that belong to the OS! System restore has to stay off also....none the less it was a pain in the ass!


-Baseline

 

[JCAnderson]

additionally, running defrag every week or so help along with disk-cleanup.
Also, if you are running XP, 512MB of ram is fine, but I would move up to 1 GB.
many newer programs are requiring 1.5-2.0GHz processors at the least. may want to consider upgrading.
also, you never stated a laptop or a desktop.
if your CPU is getting maxed out, find the process that is hogging it and find out if you need it. If you don't, get rid of it, if you can't get rid of it you should probably use "HijackThis" at the least to get more info.

definitely defrage and run disk-clean up. If you have spyware doctor....drop that program. It will start requesting more of your memory and tremendously slow down your computer.

 

[Kaiser]

Well, there are a lot of good responses here. One thing I'd like to mention however, computers do not slow down, but operating systems naturally do especially when security patches are applied over the years. If you have Automatic Updates on the plethera of security patches and service packs over the years do slow a PC down. For instance, I would say that with the specs you gave us, your PC came with Windows XP SP1 or even just a base first build of XP. With the installation of SP2 your PC will definitely slow down. Later came a tighter version of WGA which also takes time. Each individual addition or even some security patches will make you PC slower and slower. The guys already mentioned cleaning temp files & defragmenting. There are some other things that you can do as a lamen to computers that may help also. Create yourself another user by going into Control Panel \ User Accounts. While in there, "Change the way users log in..." and turn off Fast User Switching.
Do a full reboot, not just logging off, then log in witht the new account you created. Surf around a bit and see if there is a difference in speed. If there is a significant one (which I would almost bet), you can either use that user account, or rename your old profile under documents and settings so that when you log in with the old user account your old user gets a new profile. You would then need to copy your documents etc from the renamed profile to the new profile. Not very hard once you take a look at it.
Another word of mention do not have more than one scanning engine for viruses or spyware on one box with active scanning. They will both try to get a lock on the file you are trying to access at once and the kernel will hang or even time out the access which will greatly slow your access time down. Remove all of the others and find one good solution like AVP from kaspersky's labs: http://www.kaspersky.com/

Thirdly, you are teetering on lack of power with your PC. As I mentioned your operating system will update itself and the more updates (for the most part), the more power is needed.

Let us know how it turns out and I can take you further from there.

 

[Kaiser]

But as a technician that has been doing this daily for over 2yrs I can tell you with todays infections, after running my main 15 scanners, about 50% of the time the machines are still infected, in which case I will start a manual removal of each infection one a time usually involving deleting DLL's, regkeys, process's, services, BHO's, and random created directories.

I find the best way to take care of this now Dave is to just take the hard drive out and put it in a box that has an up to date good scanner that will detect rootkits along with other malware. You will get your success rate up to about 85-90% if you do so. I dont even waste time booting them up anymore, as I have a diagnostic box all set up with extra long cables (SCSI, SATA and ATA) along with power cords that are routed outside the computer case. I throw the victim box on top of the diagnostic box and just plug the cables in to the victim computer's hard drive, then start up the diagnostic box.
This config is also good for imaging as there is no need for removing the drive if you are not pulling an image from a network drive.