Is there anything to try to speed this thing up?

[hometheaterman]

So I asked about this a while ago and got it slightly faster, but still not great. Now that two of our laptops have died I need to get it working again correctly as we are down to 2 computers. Anyway, I have a desktop I built about 6 years ago. The specs are an Intel Motherboard, Intel P4 3.0GHZ with hyper threading technology, the main hard drive is a Seagate SATA, but I have a few ide ones in there too, 1GB of Ram, ATI Radeon 6800 Pro video card, Antec Power supply, running Windows XP Pro. Anyway, when I built it this thing was really fast for it's time. I could play the latest games at the time on it just fine as well as do anything else I really wanted just fine.

Now it's gotten to the point I can't even really surf the web on it. I mean literally with just firefox open it's so slow that if you try to scroll up and down web page it takes forever as it will only scroll a slight bit then stop like it's frozen then scroll a little more. It's just so slow you can't even surf the web hardly. Forget watching video's or playing basic games or anything. I mean it did all this stuff great and has for years in the past. I did have a virus on it a few weeks ago, but Microsoft Security Essentials says it got it removed. If I open the task manager which often takes a couple of minutes to open literally it says my CPU usage is at 100%. Often times it seems like Firefox is using half that and the system idle process is using 40-50% of it.

Any idea wtf is going on with this thing? I really have to have it working. I need it to process word documents, surf the web, and it would be nice to watch video's on it. I think this machine should be able to handle all of this perfectly fine.

I may just format the hard drive, but I really don't want to do that if I don't have to.

BTW if I uninstall a virus scan this thing gets about 10x faster, but I'm afraid to run without a virus scan, and it's still slower than it should be or was a few years ago.

 

[johnb35]

Perform the following in order.

1. Download and run Ccleaner and set it to the options in the attached image and then click on run cleaner.

Get Ccleaner here.

http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/

Click on where it says download latest version up top right.

2. Please download Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware from here or here and save it to your desktop.

• Double-click mbam-setup.exe and follow the prompts to install the program.
• At the end, be sure a checkmark is placed next to
  • Update Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware
  • and Launch Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware
• then click Finish.
• If an update is found, it will download and install the latest version. Please keep updating until it says you have the latest version.
• Once the program has loaded, select Perform quick scan, then click Scan.
• When the scan is complete, click OK, then Show Results to view the results.
• Be sure that everything is checked, and click Remove Selected.
• A log will be saved automatically which you can access by clicking on the Logs tab within Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware

Download the HijackThis installer from here.
Run the installer and choose Install, indicating that you accept the licence agreement. The installer will place a shortcut on your desktop and launch HijackThis.

Click Do a system scan and save a logfile

Most of what HijackThis lists will be harmless or even essential, don't fix anything yet.

Post the logfile that HijackThis produces along with the Malwarebytes Anti-Malware log

 

[rif]

You may need to some deeper cleaning with Combofix.

Defrag can breathe some new life into old machines, wouldnt hurt to check the disk for errors either

Uninstall programs you don't use

Right click My Computer > Manage > Services > Disable 'Machine Debug Manager'


If the computer is really slow with Security Essentials, then consider switching to a different antivirus such as Avast

Remove the side panel to check inside, check for excessive dust and debris