Computer help needed...

[Scales]

Ok, here's my problem. I noticed that my computer was getting slower and slower. It's a Pentium III 800Mhz with XP Pro. I have 512 MB RAM and it came with a 20G hard drive. That was pretty full and I thought it was the problem, so I got a 80G to run as a secondary. After some cleanup, I have about 81G of free space now. The problem is, that it is running a lot slower now then it did before the cleanup and second drive. Startup takes a lot longer then it used to, and it freezes a lot when I'm online. I ran Spybot and removed everything, ran NAV 2K4 and found nothing. Defraged all drives, but it's just slow as sheet! My girlfriend mentioned that it might be my OS and I should do a reinstall. My problem is that I borrowed the disc from a friend and all I have here is the ME disc that my puter came with. Does anyone agree that my original hard drive needs to be reformated and have XP put back on, or can you think of something I'm overlooking? I don't know if this matters, but I formated the new drive to be FAT 32 (was set up as NTFS) with 4 almost equal partitions.

To give you all an idea how bad it's gotten, I went to superbowl.com after the game to get stats for the pools I was in, and it froze/stalled so many times, I had to power it off completely cuz I couldn't even do a restart...

[Cryptic]

try microsoft's (cough Giant Software's) AntiSpyware Beta
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx

it works great. Spybot misses somes things, and frankly most people dont know how to use it to its full potential (IE: BHO removal, activeX, and host file list)

[Scales]

Andy, you rock!!! After running Spybot again finding 2 threats, I ran this program to find 38 more threats. I'm not too sure if it's running any better yet, but it's good to see stuff I don't want and don't know about blown away finally! Guess it's time to play some poker online and see if it crashes again...

[Syclone0044]

To be honest, if your computer is TRULY freezing/stalling (and not just operating slowly but surely), the problem is probably more severe than just spyware or fragmentation. Even a Pentium 100mhz should be able to do what you are doing, it will just take an eternity to do it. But it should never freeze. A real freeze is when the mouse does not even move anymore, and you cannot toggle the Num Lock LED on your keyboard. Is this what is happening? If so I would lean towards hardware or device drivers, especially anything recently installed. It is even possible your new hard drive has some type of conflict whether it is jumpers or DMA not enabled properly or weird motherboard IDE drivers (possibility if your motherboard is not an Intel chipset, I always stick with Intel chipsets for this reason - no external drivers needed as is the case with cheaper brands like VIA, etc.) Are you sure the 80GB is hunky-dorey with your system? A lot of older systems have problems with hard drives past a certain limit. I think 73GB is one particular limit but I'd have to search the MSKB to be sure (http://support.microsoft.com). If that's the case (and a P3-800 is old enough for this to be a possibility), you might want to check your motherboard vendor's home page to see if they have any BIOS updates and SPECIFICALLY what issues the latest releases fix since the one you have installed. If they mention things like "Added support for hard drives larger than 40GB" and the release you have is older than that, then you have found a real likely candidate for your problem. Just some ideas to check, hope they help..

[theavenger333]

honestly also, sometimes if you don't catch spyware/viruses right away, they become embedded into your system. i also agree, spybot kills lots, but it also hurts quite a bit of things. i've been using spyware doctor, it works very well, i have little problems. like josh said though with an older system it might not agree with that big HD. you might need to do a wipe and re-install, i have a 2k cd, but no xp. as for that ME cd? do it a favor and throw it out the window

[wikked]

Also... FAT32 is a snail, and much less secure of a file system than NTFS.

I'm not too big on MSAnti-Spy... it sometimes finds things that aren't Spyware, and removing them would cause things to fück up.

And it's kinda interesting how MSAnti-Spy can find *so* many more things than the others, and where all the possible holes are that things can hide in, because after all... if anyone knows the flaws of Windows, it's MS :devil

[animal]

And it's kinda interesting how MSAnti-Spy can find *so* many more things than the others,

All the other ones out there are made for the mindless masses that don't know a BHO from a dll and so forth. Putting all the functionality into those other cleaner programs would make them more effective but then morons would also delete the wrong things and ***** when they stopped working. You just can't have it both ways.

On a side note all the cleaning capability in MS's is available with about 4 other programs when you put them together. But the same risks are involved when you don't know just what the hell you're doing. The "remove all" mentality is where you can get into trouble when it comes to the way alot of this stuff is embedding itself into the system.

[Syclone0044]

But the same risks are involved when you don't know just what the hell you're doing. The "remove all" mentality is where you can get into trouble when it comes to the way alot of this stuff is embedding itself into the system.
Why do I get the feeling you're referring to the New.net / WebHancer Winsock LSP layer DLL... and the way outright deleting it breaks your TCP/IP stack ;-)

[Scales]

When I mentioned the freezing that was going on, it was only every now and then it did it, but yes, everything froze. Couldn't move the mouse, couldn't ctrl+alt+del, couldn't do anything but a hard shutdown. After running that MS Antispyware program, I've noticed it seems to be running a lot smoother. No freezes, no crashes, no real problems I guess. I know that my motherboard can handle this new drive, but I also heard that I might have to update my BIOS. I have a couple more things I have to look into, but so far, so good. Thanks for the ideas guys. It's givin me a lot of things to look at.. :thumbsup