Computer help wanted!

[Galeongirl]

Since a few days my pc is slow as hell, it takes 10 minutes to start up, to change user accounts etc..
every program is slow too and it got worse over the days
I did a virus scan, a spyware scan and adware scan and nothing came out of that.. well yea few random things I removed...

what can be the cause of this?
the pc will be defragmented soon but I'm not sure if that'll help.. it was defragmented a few weeks ago and it's not at full disc capacity either
I also cleaned out temp internet files, including all the cookies...

Did I accidentally delete a valuable file?


Oh and I'm on an online server program, admin there and I banned someone who threatened she'd hack my SID(computer's personal number) and bot me(attack the open ports of the pc to lag it down) but can that be possible for a few days??
I have 126 of the 186 gig empty, so I doubt there's too much on the processor right now... the pc is fairly new, it's about 1,5 year old...

help?

 

[Liesje]

Could be a lot of things. I first check the running processes and make sure there is no obvious reason, no process hogging all of the CPU. If it is not that an the computer is free of viruses and spyware, I start swapping out and testing the RAM modules. If it's not that, then I suspect the hard drive and run chkdsks from a Recovery Console windows CD.

 

[Galeongirl]

we did a system restore to dec. 12, and everything 'seems' to be fine now.... suddenly had a yahoo toolbar installed but I deleted that... Hope that the problem is fixed...

there was an odd program running a lot of ram.. not sure wha tthat was tho

 

[Lally1011]

Avoid installing IE add-on toolbars. Google's toolbar caused my IE to take about 30 seconds longer to display my home page.

I've had good results with using Microsoft's Defender to kill off spyware/adware. Also keep you virus program up to date. You can get McAfee for $10 at softwareoutlet.com (OEM version - this just means that you get the real McAFee cd with a jacket - no docs).

You can run MSConfig (Start...Run...MSConfig) and see what's loading when your PC fires up. You can delete anything that looks suspicious (but spware/adware will add it back in until you delete it completely).

Hope that helps.