Computer problem, need help???

[Collier11]

Ok, my gf's laptop has always ran fine, I have a virus scan and removal on it(spybot) and ad-aware which monitors cookies and tracking devices and the such so it should be decently protected though im not even sure if this issue has anything to do with viruses. In the last two months it has taken newly opened pages about 2 minutes to load(doesnt matter if they are new tabs or just a new browser). It randomly went away about 3 weeks ago and now it is doing it again as of early last week. Any ideas?

[Ike]

could be a number of things...some benign, some not so.

Have you tried re-booting?
Have you looked at what other processes are running in the background?

[Sooner_Havok]

Defrag & Disk Clean up

If you leave a computer on, it will preform these tasks itself during the night, but being a laptop I assume it doesn't get left on all night.

Defrag and Disk Clean Up can be found under system tools

[def_lazer_fc]

i'd go with ike on this and say check your system tray. a lot of people are unaware of how many programs are running automatically.

[Collier11]

ya but how do I know which ones arent necessary? It shows about 50 processes running( is that what you were talking about) but only using about 8% of cpu in use. Like I said before, this computer has always ran really well until the past month or so

[Ike]

ya but how do I know which ones arent necessary? It shows about 50 processes running( is that what you were talking about) but only using about 8% of cpu in use

check the actual memory usage (physical and physical+swap) of these things and see which ones are blowing up on you. Then check the process name on google.

Often times, what happens is your memory gets filled and things take forever because the computer is constantly writing to and reading from the disk, which is a lot slower than writing to and reading from physical memory.

Sometimes, things can use very little CPU, but a crapload of disk read/writes and slow you down just as much.

[XFollower]

Is it only slow while using IE, or slow with all things, word etc? If it's just IE, try installing firefox and if it's fast, you'll know something is up with your IE. I have this same problem on my Vista laptop. IE became dog slow, even though I can't find anything wrong with it. Firefox blazes.

[sooner_born_1960]

Spybot and adaware are not intended as first line virus preventers. You really should have true antivirus software also.

[GrapevineSooner]

Check and see if her ISP offers any 'free' Virus protection software.

For example, I have AT&T Yahoo DSL and I have the free suite of Norton Anti-Virus and Anti-Adware software installed. Of course, paying for the upgraded version of Norton, Symantec, Trend Micro, etc. never hurts as well.

And along the lines of what Ike said, how long does it take her computer to boot up nowadays? If it takes a long time, that's a key indicator that her computer is loading too many unnecessary apps on startup.

Which the more I think about it, the more I think that's the culprit.

[shaun4411]

Ok, my gf's laptop has always ran fine, I have a virus scan and removal on it(spybot) and ad-aware which monitors cookies and tracking devices and the such so it should be decently protected though im not even sure if this issue has anything to do with viruses. In the last two months it has taken newly opened pages about 2 minutes to load(doesnt matter if they are new tabs or just a new browser). It randomly went away about 3 weeks ago and now it is doing it again as of early last week. Any ideas?

do you have a celeron processor? if so, its as useful as toilet paper.

[shaun4411]

Is it only slow while using IE, or slow with all things, word etc? If it's just IE, try installing firefox and if it's fast, you'll know something is up with your IE. I have this same problem on my Vista laptop. IE became dog slow, even though I can't find anything wrong with it. Firefox blazes.

opera blazes too!

[aurorasooner]

Spybot and adaware are not intended as first line virus preventers If you don't have a true virus scan, you can DL on-demand virus scanners from several manufacturers. The only one that I've found that works w/o activeX, as I don't use IE as a browser is Trend Micro's house call. Some other programs are Ccleaner (only do the selective install, and don't under any circumstances install the yahoo tool-bar that's tagged along with it's software (or any other 3rd party tool-bars for that matter). Also HijackThis. Don't delete anything with HijackThis until you post it's log on one of the HijackThis forums. There are several HijackThis forums out there. CastleCops has a good HijackThis forum. Also SilentRunners on-demand, Super-antispyware on demand, and if you've got plenty of ram, Comodo's BoClean is a real-time anti-malware, but eats up a lot of memory. I would also recommend you dump IE and run FX, but don't get caught up in adding in a bunch of add-ons/extensions, just the add-ons for security.
Also run a Router with a FW (and change the default password), and run a quality software firewall with out-bound protection and one that can view "active-connections" especially outbounds from your computer, & one that has a FW connection log, but if you have never run a quality SW firewall and have only run one like ZAfree, the learning curve can be quite high. Some good freeware ones are On-line armor free which has HIPS, and Comodo has 2 freeware software FWs available. Their 3.0 firewall has HIPS and a virus/malware scanner that scans your computer initially. These will require some homework especially on "network rules" and aren't designed just to DL and work right "out of the box". http://www.matousec.com/projects/firewall-challenge/results.php#firewalls-ratings

[stoops the eternal pimp]

Start-Run-Msconfig-Startup tab

Look and see whats running...you should be able to uncheck a few things that are unnecessary

[aurorasooner]

Start-Run-Msconfig-Startup tab

Look and see whats runninghttp://www.whatsrunning.net/whatsrunning/main.aspx