HijackThis log - advice please

KEM

Couldn't find ctfmon in autoruns so did as you suggested and ticked and fixed in HijackThis.

Minimonitor showing that the memory used is around 22% - guess that is ok?

Rebooting the computer takes just over 1 minute to get to the logon screen and then about another 2 minutes until the Avast symbol appears at the bottom right. I'm sure that is quite a bit faster than it used to be.

The slow part now seems to be to get Firefox up and running but I guess that is because it is checking for updates to Firefox itself and the NoScript add-on.

I'll do a full Malwarebytes scan and then I guess I'm good to go.

Thanks for the help.

closed

22% is good, when (if) it gets to 95% things may slowdown. Bootup should be in the 40 seconds to 1 minute range, see the link about nvidia bloat above, it could be connected.

Avast does do an update at login, but 2 minutes to get the icon up seems odd.

you can turn off the firefox update check in the settings to speedup loading, it's not the fastest of browsers, especially with addins. IE or opera may be faster.

KEM

I think I've disabled the Nvidia stuff and hopefully the Googleupdate which I thought was already done but was still showing in HijackThis as running.

I'll try a reboot and see what happens.

closed

firefox, tools, options, advanced, update, untick all the updates boxes.

KEM

Still took nearly 2 minutes from logon screen to get Avast icon in the bottom right but at least it seems a lot cleaner than it was.

Have unchecked Firefox checking for updates and it loads much quicker now.

Will do the Malwarebytes scan and see how we go.

Many thanks for your input.

KEM

Full Malwarebytes scan was clean.

Startup seems to be faster but the pc does seem to have a bit of lag when opening new applications - no idea why.

What concerns me now though is why broadband speedtests show much slower download speeds than a laptop wired to the same router.

We recently connected via fibre optic and have been achieving speeds of around 36Mbps. Since I cleaned up this pc the speeds have been around 18-20Mbps. I assumed it must be speed being throttled due to contention ratios over the weekend as has happened in the past. This morning I expected speeds to be back up. However, if I do a speedtest from the laptop (wired) I get speeds of around 35Mbps but from this pc (also wired) I am only getting between 16-20Mbps. Have I changed something somewhere or disabled something which is reducing my download speeds?

I have rebooted the router and pc and still get the same sort of difference between the speedtests on the pc and laptop.

Please help - I wonder whether I did something stupid when trying to speed up the pc.

KEM

Just to add, if I run the test at mybroadbandspeed.co.uk using Firefox I achieve speeds of around 18Mbps if I run the test using Chrome I get around 30Mbps.

I have just uninstalled and reinstalled Firefox but it made no difference - any thoughts?

closed

Speed testers can sometimes be erratic.

Try doing the test with the avast webshield turned off, right click on the avast icon, shields control, also test with IE and operaportable.

KEM

Turned off avast webshield and the speedtest result improved from 18Mbps to 36Mbps.

Turned webshield back on and the speeds have stayed high.

Does that mean I probably had a glitch with webshield?

Just tried again and the speed has dropped back when webshield is enabled. I don't have this problem on the laptop so do I have a problem with the Avast installation on the pc? Should I uninstall and reinstall? Or something else?

closed

A couple of people on here have reported that it slows speedtests down, the key question is does it slow your browsing down noticeably, hardly makes any noticeable difference either way in my tests, but you have a far superior connection speed.

If it's slowing things down, you could always disable that one shield (untick scan http traffic), there are another 6 giving you protection.