About to throw my pc out my 3rd floor office window help!

[what..the?]

It's been getting slower and slower, its a desktop running xp, only used for surfing the web and basic admin. I have Mc afee anti virus and I have been trying to do a scan but it does not work in takes like 3 hours to check just 8 items or something so slow. I have admittedly been cancelling a couple of scans the pc has decided to do itself the reason I have cancelled them is that the scan would make my pc slow and I couldnt do any work at all. I would still allow say 1 scan a week though.

I have done a scan with lavasoft aware, and found nothing.

I dont understand why it has got so bad it seems to be effecting everything

- surfing web very slow often say 'internet page cannot be displayed/found'
- using the pc generally very slow
- try to do a full mc afee scan not working at all.

If it is a mc afee software problem I will struggle to uninstall and reinstall as it is a download from their website and I have run out of 'allowed number of downloads'

Thanks for any advice.

[barry1010]

Get rid of mcafee and use something else. There are plenty of firewalls, antivirus and antispyware programs out there, many are free.
Zone Alarm firewall
AVG antivirus
A squared.

http://www.filehippo.com/download_zonealarm_fr ee/
http://www.filehippo.com/download_avg_antiviru s/
http://www.emsisoft.com/en/software/download/ (the fourth one in the list is the free one),

[Stevesw]

Used to use norton but it was a pain so switched to AVG which is free and straightforward. Have you tried a defrag lately or deleting temporary files, in other words cleaning up your system? Is your system old may not have enough memory etc

[VHG]

Are you running any other security software or anti virus products?

Open the Windows Security centre and see what security products Windows thinks you have (anti viru, firewall etc).

I recently helped one person who had bought and installed Norton and been using it for a year.

When I went round there it turned out she had McAfee as a trial and that was already on the PC when she bought it (and before she installed Norton).

The security centre showed it was using Mcafee for everything (even though her trial had run out) and the Norton she had paid for was not doing anything.

Having more than one security product on your PC can really slow it down.

[ACtheTROLL]

first has anything changed in the basic build?
have you installed any new software?
as vhg says only one virus scanner
ad aware is NOT a virus scanner ... so you can't use it instead ... you use it allongside the virus scanner
you should also have only one firewall


next question is ... business machine ... third floor
is that you are on the third floor ... or your company has three floors?

if you are using a corporate machine ... get your IT bloke to fix it - they will know the build and software ... you could create a real mess by using diy solutions (where I work it's a sackable offence~~) - most "free software is for home use only - your company won't appreciate you putting them at risk

if not ... it sounds like the machine is just getting full

your c: should have AT LEAST 20% free space - aim for 50
install and run http://www.ccleaner.com/download

back up as much as you possibly can (at least once)
and remove
uninstall progs you aren't going to run - just in case is dumm when IS slow is reality

run scandsk
and then defrag

and that's about the best you can do

more radical - reload windows
fit more ram as a last resort ... if it was OK but has slowed down without any big changes more ram isn't going to do much

and finally
buy a new machine

[rov1200]

Keep all your data on a separate drive. Then every 6 months or so wipe the 'C' drive clean with a format and do a recovery. Like a blocked drain the computer brings in so much garbage and can ruin your registry, the only solution is to start from scratch again.
Alternatively the job can be made easier after installing all your software and drivers is to do an image backup on a separate hard drive.

[Huderon]

Also, if you are on a network in the office, get your IT bods to check your network connection. If you are using software which is installed on the network rather than simply on your machine, and you have a poor connection, that software will appear to be running very slowly, It happened to me once ... took 5 mins to load the software on my machine whereas on my boss's machine it loaded in 30 secs. The problem turned out to be a fault on my network connection rather than my PC.

[fo3nix]

If it's your own machine, and you only use it for basic tasks, why not try running Linux on it?

Ubuntu is a user-friendly distribution, which has a liveCD. This means you can freely download the CD, burn it to a disc, and then restart the machine with the CD in the drive. It'll run Ubuntu instead of Windows, which comes with a word processor, spreadsheet, firefox, email programs, games, etc.

If you like it, you can install it --- either together with Windows, or over Windows entirely. If you don't like it, just take the disc out of the machine and restart, and Windows will run like nothing else has happened.

http://www.ubuntu.com