Once zippy... now pokey
 

Hey TFPers,

Wondering if you can suggest what might be going on with Yoshi's PC. While it never was a speed demon, it did fine until a couple of days ago, when it began operating much, MUCH slower. Weirder still, programs which used to open up in smaller desktop windows (i.e. Bookworm, Bejeweled) now take over the screen and cannot be minimized.

I've run Norton and the machine's clean. I've run Spybot and taken off every suspicious file. The only thing I can figure that might have caused this is her installation of AOL 9.0 - which I've removed and reverted her back to 7.0. (Yeah, I know... but she's had the address for years.)

I'm stumped - and getting frustrated. Any ideas/suggestions?

AOL is a demon, you can't uninstall of the changes it does to your computer even by going through all of the uninstall processes.

watch for running programs

like real palyer and such

might sound like a dumb question but check the virtual memory

Yep. I thought of that, but there doesn't seem to be anything running that shouldn't be. They didn't slip real player in there or anything... I boosted the virtual memory way the hell up and haven't seen any real improvement.

Yeah, but I don't want this thread to denegrate into an "AOL sucks, what were you thinking?" thread. She uses AOL for email. Always has. That's her choice and where friends and family know to reach her. If you've got ideas about what 9.0 might have installed and how I can remove those and re-optimize the system, I'm all ears.

Do a Defrag and scan your HD for errors as well. Then get a nice registry cleaner (plenty of free ones available) and clear out everything you don't need.

Try another spyware searcher like AdAware too.
Try another brand of anti-virus to be safe too.

What OS are you running? Could have picked up a trojan like Code Red or something.

dragon hawk briings up a good point spybot does not catch every thing

try ad aware

Yep, I ran Ad Aware as well. Should have mentioned that... The machine's running Windows XP

try trendmicro.com

there free virus scan


that could help

first determine if its a disk problem or a cpu/memory problem.

sissoft sandra will benchmark your system looking for problems, if it doesnt find any, then start looking at using the performance monitor tools in windows to determines whos hogging the system, or chewing up the ram etc.

it might be file caches, or a rogue app.

i had similar problems. i got regseeker. free download.
easy to use for the most part. look in the startup items in this program and see what's loading. it may suprise you. mine ran faster after using it.
hope it helps

go into msconfig and see whats all starting up with the computer...and uncheck everything that isn't necessary...