My Computer has slowed to a crawl!!!

[Avatarp]

I bought Norton's AntiVirus yesterday, because my computer started bogging down over the last couple weeks. I ran it and it found 12 problems. 11 were resolved but 1 was a trojan horse attached to a .jpeg that affected .exe files. It couldn't resolve it so I deleted the whole directory that it was in. My computer is still running slow. What should I do now?

[JungleMan]

Maybe NAV isn't your problem. Do you have a lot of junk loading on startup? Is your computer a prebuilt or custom? When was the last time you formatted?

I say a good fresh format cleans out all those little buggers making your system slow

[Avatarp]

I am running Windows 2000 on my C: partition and XP on my E: partition. I want to format my C: partition, so what is the best way to do this. It is not as easy as format C: . How do I format my C: properly?

[Sastraxi]

Go into XP, and destroy the C:\ partition, go into the recovery console (if it doesn't do it for you) and fdisk /mbr to get it to point to XP correctly. Then, pop in the Win2k install CD and install to the partition you wiped, and it will detect XP and create a new MBR (if not you'll be stuck with 2k until you find out how to change your boot.ini again).

Hopefully it works.... I don't know much about XP as I wouldn't touch it with a pole

[Avatarp]

How do I format C:? I get a message "Windows could not format C:"

[Gimlin]

You have to format C: from your XP partition.

[JungleMan]

You can't format from within Windows.

[mendhak]

But formatting would be the chickens way out, wouldn't it?

Here's a small checklist off the top of my head:

• Download regcleaner, clean out your registry of unwanted or useless entries.
• Go to Start>Run... Type msconfig and press <ENTER>. You can go through your startup items there
• In Windows 2000, you should have a process viewer. Open it up, and simply find out which particular process is eating up your CPU time

[Gandalf_Grey_]

I format quite often, probably every 1.5 months. I employ very good backup techniques though, every file i download i put it in a dowloads folder on my deskop, when it comes time to formate i back up this downloads folder, as well as everything in my documents folder. Then i am ready to format. I keep my music collection on an old 4 gig hard drive formatted with fat32 so i can access it from linux so there is no need to backup that.

I have been doing this quite a bit as i have 14 of these backup CD's (all gotten over dial up and all of which are full.

Avatarp: a good format should do it, are you running fat32 or NTFS. If you are running fat32 goto bookdisk.com and get the one of the bootdisks (i use techwordm) and format that way

[MidgetsBro]

My Computer has slowed to a crawl!!!

Kick it and tell it to get back up and start walking.

Formatting is good for your computer. I try to format my computer every month, but recently it hasn't been possible since I am hosting my own website now.

[DiGiTaIErRoR]

Originally posted by MidgetsBro
Kick it and tell it to get back up and start walking.

Formatting is good for your computer. I try to format my computer every month, but recently it hasn't been possible since I am hosting my own website now.

Formating every month?

Overkill.

[nabeels786]

i havent formatted my comp in 9 months, and its running good as new
(win xp pro)

[DiGiTaIErRoR]

I run win2k, no serious problems.

[siyan]

if you don't do stupid **** to your computer then it'll last at least 6 months between formats. (2k or XP pro....anything 9x will die within 1 week of a fresh format )

[Avatarp]

I formatted my C: and Installed XP Pro to it. How ever my XP Pro on my E: partition still runs brutally slow. Even the XP Pro on my C: partition runs slow. I wonder if this Trojan Horse that affects .exe files has managed to infect the hard drive. Refer to the first message for details of my Virus scan.

[parksie]

You can't "infect" a hard disk. I never found any problems with Win2K slowing down gradually like 9x did, though.

[Avatarp]

NA is finding the same virus periodically all over my hard drive. Everything runs slows. NA doesn't find any viruses when I do a scan. I think that I have to format the entire hard drive and start over. If this is the case I need to back up everything I want to keep. Anybody have an FTP site I can borrow for a couple days? LOL

[Guv]

Do you ever defrag your hard drives?

[Pc_Madness]

Does your computer meet the system requirements for xp?

[siyan]

Originally posted by Pc_Madness
Does your computer meet the system requirements for xp?

better yet does it double them?

-C

[Pc_Madness]

Originally posted by siyan
better yet does it double them?

-C

I thought they did double the system requirements?

[siyan]

On MS's site

Here's What You Need to Use Windows XP Professional
PC with 300 megahertz or higher processor clock speed recommended; 233 MHz minimum required (single or dual processor system);* Intel Pentium/Celeron family, or AMD K6/Athlon/Duron family, or compatible processor recommended
128 megabytes (MB) of RAM or higher recommended (64 MB minimum supported; may limit performance and some features)
1.5 gigabytes (GB) of available hard disk space*
Super VGA (800 × 600) or higher-resolution video adapter and monitor
CD-ROM or DVD drive
Keyboard and Microsoft Mouse or compatible pointing device

I hope it didn't used to be 150 Mhz, 64MB/32MB, 750 MB HD.....

-C

[Guv]

Siyan: Are those really the MS specifications for an XP system? By modern standards, I would expect that system to seem to be crawling running DOS 6.22 if doing anything other than something like word procesing or a spread sheet.

Avatarp: If you do not need to defrag and your system was running faster in the past, perhaps you should download and use a utility to check for Spyware eating up system resources or download a utility to get rid of some unnecessary programs started when the OS loads.

Also, check your Swap File. Pehaps it got changed.

I am not sure what runs on XP, NT, or Win2k, but I am sure there are utilities out there. I use Startup.exe to control the programs which start when the OS loads (It finds programs which elude msconfig.exe), and Ad-Aware 5.62 to search and destroy Spyware, which Dvorak claims can slow your system and cause crashes. Both of these utilities and many others are available at the PC Magazine Site (www.zdnet.com).

[Pc_Madness]

Originally posted by siyan
On MS's site

I hope it didn't used to be 150 Mhz, 64MB/32MB, 750 MB HD.....

-C

Noo... I think it used to be 64 mb of ram, but they've bumped that up to 128.

I'm not sure about the rest of the specs though...