Why is my Windows Vista extremely slow?

[Natalie S]

My laptop has gotten so slow and I dont know whats causing it and would
like to know how to fix it without having to send it away to get fixed
(im too skint)

I have LOADS of space left, barely anything installed, and ive no idea
on what is causing this problem. Ive tried using CCleaner to search for
viruses and to clean the laptop up but it said there were none found.

Thanks to all x

 

[Charles W Davis]

CCleaner is great for what it is intended. Try http://www.malwarebytes.org
to remove Trojans, and other miscellaneous malware. Install, update and do a
complete scan...

 

[Dustin Harper]

CCleaner cleans out your registry and temp files. You would also need an
Anti-Virus and Anti-Malware program to clean it thoroughly.

Try Microsoft Security Essentials (www.microsoft.com/Security_Essentials) or
AVG Free (http://www.avg.com). Both are free. Also, try Malwarebytes
(http://www.malwarebytes.org) for a great anti-malware program.

Run those in addition to CCleaner, and your computer should improve in speed
and reliability.

Dustin Harper
http://www.mstechpages.com
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

CCleaner cleans out your registry and temp files.

Everything CCleaner does, it does well. It's a good program and I
recommend it highly. But the one of its features I would strongly
recommend *against* uses is its registry cleaning feature.

Registry cleaning programs are *all* snake oil. Cleaning of the
registry isn't needed and is dangerous. Leave the registry alone and
don't use any registry cleaner. Despite what many people think, and
what vendors of registry cleaning software try to convince you of,
having unused registry entries doesn't really hurt you.

The risk of a serious problem caused by a registry cleaner erroneously
removing an entry you need is far greater than any potential benefit
it may have.

Read http://www.edbott.com/weblog/archives/000643.html

You would also need an
Anti-Virus and Anti-Malware program to clean it thoroughly.

Bear in mind that the word "malware" is simply a shortening of
MALicious softWARE. So viruses and spyware are two types of malware
and an anti-virus program *is* an anti-malware program.

What you mean, I assume, is an anti-virus program and an anti-spyware
program. Yes, I agree (it's likely that Natalie is infected), except
that I always recommend at least two anti-spyware programs. The two
best ones are MalwareBytes Anti-Malware (which you recommend below)
and SuperAntiSpyware.

 

[Gil Tennant]

Trojan Scanner give you a trial period, during which it removes anything it
may find, in the category of Malware. It fixed a serious infection on my XP
machine, when nothing else even saw that it was infected (The infection would
re-direct my browser ONLY when I attempted to visit online scanning sites,
like Kaspersky, etc.)

It was a person in an Australian support forum web site, that first put me
onto it, and it's not an online scanning tool, so the infection allowed me to
download from SimplySup's web site.

Try this:
http://www.simplysup.com/

 

[f/fgeorge]

Another thing to try is malwarebytes.org and avast.com both have free
versions and after dwonload and updating do a good job of finding
stuff. Other than that how much ram do you have in the machine? If not
at least 2 gig you need to upgrade it. How old is the laptop? If
several years you could just be experiencing 'user familiarity'
meaning you now know what it is going to do next and are waiting on
the machine instead of it waiting on you. My dad swore that his
machine never did the ram count on bootup until he had owned the
machine about 3 months. He is almost 80 and it was just too fast for
him to see it. As he became more familiar with the machine it "slowed
down" and he saw all kinds of new things. Of course it had been doing
all of them all along, he was just catching up to it.

One other thing CCleaner is NOT an anti-virus, it IS a registry
cleaner and if used incorrectly can make your machine unbootable! BE
CAREFUL!!

 

[Ömer Coşkun]

what is your computer's properties and wh,ch programs have you installed
that machine?