Very slow booting and operating

[Fitterit]

hope I am posting this in the correct area. This is my first post and I am a novis, but would like to learn about how pc's work and to repair them This is my daughters pc. She has been using it for the internet mostly but it the past few weeks it has slowed way down, It takes 45 minutes just to boot to the start screen. It takes several minutes just to open a folder once it has booted. It has been running with AVG 7.5 virus protection, I was able to update it and scanned the pc yesterday. It took almost 13 hours to do the scan,it found & removed 2 trojian hourse virus's. This scan has made no change with the speed. I have tryed to run Ad-Aware but I keep getting an error put up stating, Error: 1814 has occured. could not login to service. Are you runnig this aplication as another user? I am wondering if it the hard drive that going or if its somthing else? any help on this would be great, Thanks. Running windows x/p s/p 2 H/P Pavilion 9694c Athlon processor 805MHZ 256MB Ram. I also ran the clean up disk and the disk defrag but still no change in speed. I have also tryed to restore back to october, but it won't do it, it says to try another date, so I did but got the same pop up.

[nhan]

you can try to download malwarebytes and run a scan. I suspect you have a lot of spyware in your system, or if it's too much, just do a fresh install.

[Spools]

Your AdAware is probably out of date. Try using Malwarebytes as nhan suggested. You might want to install Spybot Search and Destroy too.

Your AVG is out of date also. You'll need to uninstall it and install the latest. You can download it here.

Using CCleaner will probably help get rid of some waste too.

Sounds like you've got lots of work to do. If it doesn't have any data you really need to keep it might be best to format and reinstall.

Good luck.

[MrDravenX]

Install the latest AVG software as stated above and reboot in safe mode than scan the computer with AVG, Spybot Search & Destroy and Malwarebytes. Personally I would just reformat instead of dealing with the headache.

[shadowpr]

While following everyones suggestions will help, having only 256mb of ram will severly limit the gains made.

That's just not enough for a xp sp2 system.

[MrDravenX]

Originally Posted by shadowpr While following everyones suggestions will help, having only 256mb of ram will severly limit the gains made. That's just not enough for a xp sp2 system.

I didn't notice that. Step one, upgrade your ram ASAP. Our gov. computers at least have 500MB. I haven't seen a computer with ram that low in about 10 or years.

[glc]

I would run manufacturer's diagnostics on the hard drive. This can be symptomatic of a failing hard drive.

800 MHz and 256mb ram is going to be slow as snails with XP no matter what - but 45 minutes is just painful. How large is the hard drive and how much free space does it have?

[Fitterit]

Originally Posted by glc I would run manufacturer's diagnostics on the hard drive. This can be symptomatic of a failing hard drive. 800 MHz and 256mb ram is going to be slow as snails with XP no matter what - but 45 minutes is just painful. How large is the hard drive and how much free space does it have?

The hard drive is 40 Gb and I have 28 Gb free space.

[glc]

Okay, now run diagnostics. They can be downloaded from the hard drive manufacturer. Please read their instructions, they will tell you how to download it and make the boot media.

[Fitterit]

Originally Posted by glc Okay, now run diagnostics. They can be downloaded from the hard drive manufacturer. Please read their instructions, they will tell you how to download it and make the boot media.

Thanks, I will give that a try. I have down loaded Malwarebytes and am running it now.

[liambl]

I have had XP successfully running on 500MHz and 128MB RAM. It wasn't pretty, but it still booted in under 2 mins and opened folders >5 seconds. I have seen a failing hard drive do this many a time, start there.

[Fitterit]

Does anyone know if there is registry cleaner for hard drives that can be downloaded for free? I downloaded one for free and I was able to scan with it but I would have to pay to have the bugs fixed that it found.

[shadowpr]

ccleaner has a registry cleaner.

[not important]

I use Regseeker for registry cleaning. Efficient and safe.