So, my computer is fucked.

[tephramancy]

I don't know what's wrong with it. It's so slow, I can barely open a firefox window without crashing it, let alone do anything interesting. I've tried doing a virus scan, it either crashes before it can finish, or it scans for three hours and finds nothing. I've tried turning off all non-essential system processes (well, james did that, I watched

Comments

[bridd]

You've probably done this already, but maybe run spybot to scan for spyware?

[tephramancy]

Ah, no I hadn't. Saw it mentioned on a couple of threads I was reading about performance, but wasn't sure how reliable it was. I'll give it a go :)

[mofette]

I would hit it with a triple whammy of Spybot, Adaware and then a virus checker like AVG [although a lot of people hate that one]

[tephramancy]

Yeah, AVG wouldn't complete without locking up. Tried running it for three hours, and it just couldn't find anything, and in the end, wouldn't even keep looking. Spybot found a couple of tracking cookies, and nothing else. Gonna run AdAware now and see if anything falls out.

[jcaswell]

Spyware would be my first thought, along with checking free space (you should always keep an absolute minimum of 10% of the drive free). If the spyware scan / virus scan won't complete without crashing, plug the drive into a second computer as a slave drive and scan it that way :)

[tephramancy]

It's a practically brand new harddrive, don't think it's even 15% full yet. I think if AdAware doesn't find anything, I'm just gonna reformat both HDD's and start from the beginning. I'm tired of running round in circles trying to figure this out :(

[jcaswell]

That's often the quickest option tbh. Although I'm very odd, and I find formatting quite satisftying for some reason!

[tephramancy]

Yeah, I've already wasted a whole two days chasing my tail trying to figure out what's going on, I could've had them both cleaned, everything reinstalled and reconfigured, and purring like a pussycat by now if I'd just done that to start with. And at least if I reformat, and it's still buggered, I know it's a hardware issue, and can just start pulling bits out and putting them back in til I figure out what's wrong. I like that part :)

[cokephreak]

you say you tried disabling the system restore ... Have you tried *using* it?
Roll it back as far as it will go and see if the problem behaviour is still there...

I almost always recomned this course of action

[lilfurrydan]

In this weather, I'd say overheating. What's its ventilation like?

("Sultry" indeed...)