Expert: Carolyn Meinel - 1/15/2010

Question
QUESTION: My PC is extremely slow, This has been getting worse monthly. I was told that sometimes programs are running in the background that slows it down.  I have no idea how to find these as I'm not very PC savvy. Can you help?

ANSWER: Many things could cause this problem. Here are some things to check:

1. Are you running Explorer or Firefox? They both are memory hogs and will slow down older PCs. Use the Chrome browser instead, free from http://www.google.com/chrome

2. Hold down the Ctrl and Alt keys while hitting the Delete key to bring up Task Manager. Look under the Processes tab to see if anything obvious is hogging CPU or memory.

3. Maybe your hard drive has become too fragmented. Instructions to easily diagnose and fix it at http://www.google.com/chrome

4. Or -- and maybe this has you worried big time -- some cybercrime gang may have recruited your computer to secretly email spam, to run denial of service attacks or host a website selling V14gr4.  All this activity can slow your computer big time, and their evil infections -- "botnets" -- hide from Task Manager. If this is your problem, you *might* be able to solve it by uninstalling your current antivirus program and installing a different one that might work better. Download either Kapersky Internet Security, which offers a free 30 day trial at http://kapersky.com, or F-Secure's Complete Internet security suite, which offers a free thirty day trial: https://store.f-secure.com/cgi-bin/dlreg/ml=EN?ID=FSISTB&desid=TRIAL

5. If none of this works, what will ALWAYS work, but is painful, and is what a computer repair shop would do -- is to "nuke" your computer. That means saving all your data on CDs or DVDs or other removable media, reformatting the hard drive(s), returning it to the factory settings from when you first bought it, then uploading all of Microsoft's gazillions of security patches etc. then reinstalling all your applications. I sincerely hope you don't have to do this, if if you must, let me know and I'll show you how.

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: My PC is 3yrs old.  When I used to go online I clicked on peoplepc on my desktop which opened people PC home page with all my e-mail listed I then went to web mail to get my e-mail. If I surfed the web I googled whatever I was looking for, so I don't know what browser I use. I have Norton which has 14 days left, I purchased McAfee to install, someone told me it was better and that it didn't take up as much space on my PC. I haven't installed it yet, as I'm afraid I won't do it right. Is kapersky better and why?  I have dial up,(only thing available here)so sometimes it's hard to get things downloaded before my computer kicks of line.
I checked the task master and a lot of things are listed, I have defragged my PC, and ran spybots, nothing shows up.

Do you have any idea how expensive it would be to take it to a repair man and have him nuke my computer.  The local man charges 50$ hr.

Answer
The main thing you need to do for installing a new antivirus is to make certain you uninstall the old one first. Use the Add/remove programs feature to do this, click Start --> Control Panel to get to this feature.

Kapersky is supposed to be one of the world's best antivirus programs, but McAfee is easier for a novice user such as you. So my advice is to get McAfee's complete security suite, including firewall and antispyware.

If all you want a computer repair person to do is "nuke" your computer, he or she should be able to give you a guaranteed price because the procedure is pretty much the same for any computer. If you also need your data saved by a repair person, however, that could cost you several hundred dollars depending upon how much data you have, how big your hard drive is, how many places you have stored data, etc.

As a novice user, I recommend getting a repair shop to "nuke" your system. But if you wish to learn how to nuke it yourself, I'll give you instructions.