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Slow computer

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by gary

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I am running win98. All of a sudden, my machine has slowed to a crawl. This is what I have done so far to clear things up. In msconfig, I have set only the systry and explorer to run. Cleaned out all the Internet and temp files. My disk shows as being 1/2 full, running a 20 gig drive. I have not loaded any new programs.

Programs will load quickly but if you get more then one program up everything comes to a halt. Memory is running at about 60-70%. Any suggestions as to what to check for would be greatly appreciated.

7 replies

by oz_media

Adaware is a great tool for detecting spyware and adware.
It is quite common for even the most careful user to pick up files that have tracking sotware attached. Even surfing the web you'll pick these up from time to time and your symptoms point to the problem. Your PC may be trying to send/recieve info, load ads etc. Worth running a scan to see the results anyhow,http://www.lavasoft.com .

Good luck, keep me posted.

by guruofdos

Try this. Boot the machine and then connect to the internet. I assume you are using either dialup, cable or DSL. When you establish a connection, don't launch your e-mail or browser programs...simply bring up the connection status window and sit andwatch the transmitted and recieved figures with one eye and then watch your HDD activity LED on the PC with the other. Having negotiated a connection which involves sending and receiving a few tens of kbits of data, the figures should then remain fairly static and if you are not running any other programs, the disk activity should be negligible. If on the other hand, data is being transmitted or received and the HDD light is beavering away, suspect that you may have a trojan or virus acting as an smtp mailer which is sending out data from your PC in an attempt to distribute itself. If you have any kind of abnormal activity, try the Security Check and Virus scanning applets at www.symantec.com to see if this finds anything unusual on your machine. Spyware should also be picked up by these scans and I agree with Oz that this could be an issue, although his Adaware link didn't work - it should be www.lavasoft.de, unless you particularly WANT to learn Japanese!

by oz_media

Oops sorry bout the link, too many com's in the world. It is an interesting site I suppose but not the intended link that GuruOfDos pointed out should be lavasoft.de.
Damn, I think I sent that link to a few customers last week!

by guruofdos

I took two machines...the wifes PC hasn't been touched since I built it a couple of years ago. Running 98SE and AOL. My 'spare' PC got a format and re-install of 98SE, IE6 and nothing else. Both of us logged on to the net simultaneously and just spent an hour or two surfing at random, following links and generally just mooching around in cyberspace.

I then ran Adaware on both machines. The AOL machine had 6 items that Adaware flagged as being dubious. The reformatted machine had 72!

Justgoes to show that it doesn't take very long to catch a dose of cyber-clap! Alternatively, it could mean that my surfing habits are more dubious than those of the missus.

The worst part of it?? Of my two hours online before running Adaware, a good 80 minutes of that was spent in Techrepublic...and I only visited the US State department website and Microsoft.com after leaving TR!!!

by guruofdos

...when you do mistype a URL or follow a misquoted link and inadvertantly discover something infinitely more interesting than what you were originally looking for!

Alternatively, finding a site actually exists when you just type in stuff almost at random...this happened to me back when I worked in retail. Rather than extensively test 'faulty' products returned to our store by customers, us more laid-back techs would just conjour up a fault out of thin air. One guy always used to return products with 'Faulty GUNT' written on the returns label and it was only ever once queried by head office. His explanation...GUNT stood for Generic Universal Non-specific Thing. Then he decided to create a web site and try and register the name gunt.com and found it already existed...we then proceeded to waste a whole afternoon browsing the site!

by oz_media

Gunt ,for me, was coined by the lead singer of a local metal band that I produced once.
"grumble, grumble, silly gunt!
Have a good one, I don't want to start another never ending post.

by zeromeoutnospam

Check the fans in your Pc. Your cpu might be overheating. Open your Pc and see if the heat-sink/fan are set correctly and that the fan is working

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