My laptop is being incredibly slow, please help

ecangel24

Hi,

I was just wondering if anyone could help. As my title suggests my laptop has slowed right down and is driving me crazy!
It's olny a couple of months old and i presume it has some sort of virus, but have no idea how to sort it out. I've tired reading the guide on here, and the what's the latest recommendation thread oh and the sticky at the top. But unfortunately I think i'm just too much of a simpleton!

If you could help i would be very grateful as I'm trying to do my dissertation and i'm being driven insane!

Thank you

spakkker

What antivirus do you have ? Will it scan now?
Have you got much stuff on the laptop to save?
Do you have the laptop manual ? This is in case you have factory settings on a hidden part of your hard-drive
Will it write to cd/dvd? Do you have access to another pc?

ecangel24

I had mcafee, but that ran out. I now just have the windows defender, which i guess is silly but really don't know where to start! thats currently running a scan by the way.
what about adware or is it called spyware?!
Anything important is all saved to USB sticks, is that safe?
The manual is at my home, not here at uni. But when i bought the laptop, it said to back up the system to disks, so I did.

sorry for being such an idiot!

ecangel24

oh forgot to say today i've deleted my private data, cookies and things on firefox. And a disk clean up.

I'm sure someone once told me that was important to do!

macman

ecangel24 wrote: »

oh forgot to say today i've deleted my private data, cookies and things on firefox. And a disk clean up.

I'm sure someone once told me that was important to do!

Did someone not also tell you that it was important not to run without any antivirus installed?
Defender is an anti-spyware program which comes built into Vista. It is not an antivirus program. McAfee is not very good, but it's infinitely better than nothing. You will need to clean your system and then install a reliable antivirus such as Avira or Kaspersky.
Someone will be along shortly to advise you what to do next.

marsden_pete

you can get AVG anti virus free of charge

i also run spybot search and distroy

also might be worth installing free ram which will help free up your ramand make your computer run faster.

what make and model laptop is it?

aliEnRIK

Download MALWAREBYTES (Make sure you click 'DOWNLOAD NOW')
http://www.download.com/Malwarebytes-Anti-Malware/3000-8022_4-10804572.html
UPDATE and FULL SCAN
Post the log here AFTER youve deleted everything it finds


reboot

Download HIJACK THIS (Make sure you click 'DOWNLOAD LATEST VERSION')
http://www.filehippo.com/download_hijackthis/
Click DO A SCAN AND SAVE A LOGFILE (Takes seconds) then post the log so we can see whats running
(do NOT do anything else with Hijack but scan and post the FULL log)

spakkker

It might be worth downloading the mcaffee removal tool and getting rid of mcaffee - http://download.mcafee.com/products/licensed/cust_support_patches/MCPR.exe
save to desktop. Some anti-vurus can be a problem in themselves. If you are able to download avira try that for now , its not bad and it's free.
See - http://www.pchell.com/virus/uninstallmcafee.shtml

undercover_pillow

Windows have a program called "autoruns" which lets you stop any program running when you switch on the computer. Just turn all un-necessary programs off and let them load up when you actually need them!

Your processor fan may be full of dust too, give it a clean if you can

Pillow

macman

undercover_pillow wrote: »

Windows have a program called "autoruns" which lets you stop any program running when you switch on the computer. Just turn all un-necessary programs off and let them load up when you actually need them!

Your processor fan may be full of dust too, give it a clean if you can

Pillow

It's 2 months old and the OP has been running without any antivirus for a month! Dust is not the problem...

undercover_pillow

2 months! Cripes, try the autoruns software then by microsoft, just google it and it's the first result