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Hi
My friends computer is so slow it reminds me of an old 486!! Can anyone in the know please give advice on how to clean up this system and thus make the computer run at the speed at which it is designed.
many thanks

hello,
you provided very little details. maybe the computer itself is kinda old? maybe your friend set many programs to start on boot. i know some anti-viruses has option to scan a computer on boot, in this case the boot may take some time.anyway, i recommend running antivirus and antispyware scans just in cases. maybe there are some nasty things hiding in the dark ;)
tc;

Backup, format, start from scratch. Really, why spend hours on end trying to figure out what the culprit is.

astroraptor, because the culprit might stay after everything you recommended to do. personally i would format and reinstall windows, but that doesn't help in each case.
i assisted this person who said he kept formatting C drive but the infection kept reappearing all the time. finally i came up with the reason: he had illegally downloaded movies on other drives that required a "codec" to watch them. you can easily guess the reason of infection he had, he always downloaded the fake codec which installed other malwares.
what i'm trying to say is: if there are some problems with infected files the problems won't be gone if you format hard drives but keep the files on dvd or usb.
tc;

@ astroraptor
Not the most helpful of solutions!!
@ Kaithlyn
Thanks for your help, I am running Spybot and it found very little, the anti-virus software is AntiVir and this has not found any problems!
The computer is about 3 years old, but had worked at a good speed but has now slowed considerably. It is used by my friend and her two daughters and between them they seem to download the world lol Maybe they have installed something nasty that the anti-vir are not finding?
I heard about the HiJackThis and wondered if I should try and install this to see if it fixes the Registry? what do you suggest?
Many thanks again :¬)
many thanks

The first thing to try on a slow computer is
CCleaner this link will get you ccleaner with
out the yahoo tool bar ,
http://www.majorgeeks.com/CCleaner_...
next defrag
and the next thing is how many real time protection progams are you running because every time you access a file it is checked by them all , this will slow you down
regards

@ Jack Frost46
Many thanks, have run CCleaner and Defragged the hard drive and it seems to have speeded up a little but not too significantly.
Running the following programs:
Antivirus = AntiVir
Firewall = Windows Firewall
Junk Bot = Spybot S&DNothing else is running that I am aware of.
Any further help is appreciated.
many thanks

Well if you want to be sure you could run
malawarebytes-anti malware & clear all it finds , like all anti-malware , AV it can throw up false positives but very rarely ,and can be retrieved from quarantine
apart from the programs you mentioned do you have many other programs that auto start ? they could slow your computer down at start-up and use resources . if so temporarily disable them from start>>run>>>msconfig>>>start up & see which ones are slowing you the most .I hope this has been of help to you , also I think that if you had serious malware problems they would have manifested themselves in other ways by now .
Regards

malwarebytes antimalware is great. however if you're willing to try hijackthis, the procedure is not complicated. here's hijackthis download, install the program and run it to make a log. then copy a log and post it on some hijackthis analysis forum. here are some forums: hijackthis log analysis
HijackThis Logs and Malware Removal.tc;

@ Jack Frost46
Many thanks again for all your help, very much appreciated.
@ Kaithlyn
I have followed your advice regarding the hijackthis, here's hoping it'll all get sorted.
To all that have helped - cheers :¬)
many thanks

Hi
try this program from http://www.incodesolutions.com/remo...
download http://www.incodesolutions.com/down...
based on my own experience 99% of the time it solves the problem

Actually a reformat and reinstall would be the way I would go also. If you arent smart enough to figure out whats making it slow than a format and reinstall makes sense. Also ask anyone that run for performance and stability and they recommend a reinstall every so often. The reason Install uninstall install unistall. You will have pieces leftover, a bloated registry. etc. Now i know im not going to spend three days trying to clean everything when a wipe and reinstall takes. hours. So yes that was a viable and good suggestion. Now as for your friend with the codec issue. if you pirate expect problems. I mean Come on.

Your choice of Anti-Virus and Anti-Malware
makes a huge difference in the performance of
your computer. Some take a very brute-force
approach and do full CRC regression testing
on each file write and read. If you
aren't running a modern 7200 RPM hard drive
you are going to want to cry while this is
happening.I've been using Windows Live One Care for the
simple fact that it seems to have the least
amount of impact on system performance.One way you can determine if the AV software
is the issue is to simply disconnect
(physically) from your network, turn off the
AV software, and reboot. If it's
significantly faster then you need to think
about either a hardware upgrade or changing
AV software.

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