quick quick slow

[lecheekyworm]

Why does my computer suddenly go slow?  I have broadband and windows XP and all is fine and then suddenly it slows to a crawl and there's nothing else open.

[Wavy Davy]

Do you check your PC for spyware? Download any or all of the following (all free):

Spybot Search & Destroy
Adaware
Microsoft Antispyware

If you have not done this before you will be horrified at the number of unwelcome and intrusive pieces of software that are living in your machine and using up your processing power.

[lecheekyworm]

Wavy Davy - I do have Norton anti-virus and microsoft antispyware - do I need any more? Will they not all work against each other.  Sorry am a bit ignorant in all this.

[Wavy Davy]

I'm a bit ignorant myself, so that's ok. I haven't really had a chance to play Antispyware up against the other two I mentioned, but I will. I have been using Spybot and Adaware side-by-side for a while now.

Adaware spots lots of things that Spybot doesn't (I haven't run Adaware before Spybot so I don't know if the reverse is true also), but the free Adaware doesn't keep watch over your PC full-time like Spybot does. I'd give the lot of them a try if I were you.

Spybot warns that other spyware software might think that Spybot is itself spyware, but I've not had that happen. But for this reason you should read through the list of villains that have been found before letting the software purge them - it might purge something you want to keep.

The whole PC thing is a bit daunting - you are constantly trusting things to look after your PC for you and you don't know if they work and so on. It can be a bit of a leap of faith, but the more you try the more you gain in confidence.

Good luck

[stevie21]

Any spyware prog on it's own will miss lots of nasties (they detect a maximum of 60% in tests) so you're actually recommended to use more than one at a time (unlike antivirus progs : they'll clash if you use more than one).

Another option is to look at the "Processes" in Task Manager (hold Ctrl and Alt, then press "Delete").
First close down any progs that you don't need (less processes to check) and then enter the process names into this site
http://www.processlibrary.com/
which will tell you if any such process is a nasty or not.

If it IS nasty, again search google for "<nastyName> remove" which often takes you to a Symantec site offering a removal tool.

It's probably much easier to just let the antispyware do all of this hard work for you!!

[Wavy Davy]

Handy info, Stevie.