A friend of mine had some serious problems with his PC with windows 98. It was a P4 with 512 MB ram, so I figured no problem, I FDisked it and installed a fresh copy of XP Pro. It didn't fix the problem! His programs will sometimes not load, his computer is ULTRA slow and there is obviously something wrong. A friend of mine said he might have a virus that somehow stayed in the computer even though I wiped it out and reinstalled everything. Is that possible? I put in AVG Free version for him, but he says it doesn't tell him he has a virus. Can anyone help me figure out what's wrong and/or how to fix this?

Thanks in advance!

I can't imagine a virus that would live through Fdisk new partitions, formatting and a clean install. Open the task manager and view the CPU usage. Is it high while the system is in an idle state? If so look at the processes and see if there is a process that is hogging the "cpu time" other than the system idle process that should normally run around 97 percent. If there is another process that is hogging "cpu time" then identify it, it may possibly be spyware or malware or it could be a process that is "hung up" due to a corrupted or damaged installation.

Aroostook County Maine Computer Repair Service
http://www.thepc-emt.com

I would suggest to download avast, turn off the AVG and install avast and let it do a bootscan to see if there are any viruses onboard.

Another thing you might do is let the PC do a disc scan to see if there are any bad sectors on the drive, sounds like the drive might be on it's last legs, especially if it came from a 98 machine.

Hopefully my advice will help you...Please post back with your results....thanks

It can't be a virus, if you wipe your HDD clean then nothing would live through it.
It could be a hardware problem.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ 1MB L2 per core
4GB Dual Channel ECC 667MHZ
320GB SATA RAID 0 7,200RPM
10/100/1000 Gigabit Networking
XFI 7.1 surround sound
Dual ATI XGE X1300 512MB VC 600MHZ