Vaio laptop spyware/virus/malware

garcia

albertross wrote:

at the poin t it slows down, there will be a process in task manager using a lot of cpu, if you can identify that, it will point us in the right direction.

There isn't. The slowdown occurs *every* time there is disk access, no matter what program is accessing the disk, no matter what file is being accessed. Boot up is slow (4-5 times slower than it should be?) for this very reason. Every time the disk is accessed the cursor stutters/jumps, audio skips and the system generally behaves like a 486.

Before you go down the format route, I suggest you uninstall all the extra's one by one, defender, zonealarm etc, to try and identify the culprit. (you don't have windows firewall on as well as ZA do you)? The other thing to try, is to remove all the programs from the ZA allow/deny screen, and let them re-prompt you. If you have ticked deny to a crucial process, then that could cause a stall.

I've uninstalled all extras, including zone alarm & avg. Hasn't made a blind bit of difference. Windows firewall was off.

albertross_2

Try chkdsk c: /F /R, and reboot.. and defrag

That's the only thing left I can think of.

You've checked for malware, rootkits
You've checked for process and memory hogs.
You have a reasonable amount of ram 512.

which leaves a faulty or corrupt disk, or some misconfiguration.

http://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm

Try creating another account, and log on as that, see if the problem happens, that will rule out a profile issue.

How long does it take to bootup to the login screen?

Anything in Eventvwr?

garcia

Ok i've had enough. Sorry guys - thanks very much for the help - it was much appreciated.

Its not a fragmentation problem, or a faulty/corrupt disk.

Incidentally exactly the same problem occurred over christmas - I fixed it by doing a reinstall. This time around I was really hoping to find the root cause but its defeated me once again.

It can't be a profile issue because the problem occurs from boot - i.e. even before log-on its inordinately slow.

I haven't timed it (I'm copying files over at the moment) but I'd estimate it takes about 4 minutes to boot up. It should be about 20 seconds.