Really Really slow computer.

[majik624]

I have a troubling problem. My boss has a computer running XP. It is 2.8 gHz 32 bit, 4g ram and about 40g hard drive space free. It was running so slow as to be unusable. She would click on an IE link and it would close the page then re-open it with dozens of pop-ups. Her home page and search engine were hijacked. I ran malwarebytes and got rid of 1300+ problems. I ran norton, spybot and ad-aware. Finally ran trend-micro housecall. It seemed to be clean. The problem is that it still runs incredibly slow. If you click on anything (web page or "my computer") it shows me the hourglass for about 5-10 min. I even see the flashlight sometimes. A 2.8 gHz machine shouldn't ever show those. I have the running processes down to a minimum. I cleaned out the start menu. In the task manager I see a bunch of cpu spikes but only briefly. The cpu and memory usage appear normal. When I run in safe mode it runs fine so that tells me it's not the hardware. I also ran process explorer and didn't see anything unusual. I have never run across anything like this. I am computer savvy and have dealt with many virus filled machines. This is by far the worst I have ever encountered. I spent over 8 hrs. trying to fix it. 95% of that was waiting for it to respond to mouse clicks. Any help or ideas are welcome as I don't know what to look for at this point.

 

[Enthusiast PC Builder]

Try looking for start-up process and see if disabling them makes a difference. If not the best thing may be to use CCleaner's tool to wipe free space. This will get rid of all the jumbled overwritten files. Then run CClenaers regisrty cleaner and then run a defrag tool. thats all i can think of i think.

 

[Guest]

That computer really needs replacing. Best suggestion is to format the drive and re-install from scratch.

Any "fix" you find will be a short term measure only.

 

[majik624]

I agree with both of you. If it were my computer I would have wiped it after finding 1300 malwares. I tried CCleaner and it did clean up alot of stuff. The defragging was the only thing I could think of as well but when I listened to the hard drive it wasn't jumping all over while accessing data. I think she wants a reinstall as the last resort. Maybe I can convince her yet.

 

[hang-the-9]

Re-install the operating system. Even if it's a P4 system with 4 gig of RAM on XP it should run OK. Hard drive issue would also cause slow system use, watch the drive activity light, if it's always on even after the system is fully booted (say 5 minutes after the icons pop up) and you are not doing anyting, I'd replace the drive. Make sure it'a 7200 rpm one.