I'm not a very techie person, and lately I've noticed that my system has been slowing down. I've run my Kaspersky anti-virus (trial version) to find if there is any virus or malware... but it came out clean. I've also done a restore... but the problem persists. What could be wrong? Please help.
Norton anti-virus doesn't slow down your system much, so I recommend that. Do a disk clean-up. Defragment your hard drive. Shut down your computer every night.
Internet Explorer > Tools > Manage Add Ons > Enable Or Disable Add Ons Disable all add ons Especially Shockwave Your system might be slowing down because many web sites have advertising that is video - moving pictures - and the file size is big, takes more time to load. You can always enable Shockwave again when you want to watch videos.
It's quite common for a windows machine, especially XP and earlier, to slow down after a long period of use. - One issue that can cause sluggishness is fragmentation of the data on the hard drive, particularly the paging file and the registry. The paging file is where the operating system stores data when it needs to free up ram to run applications - it just dumps it onto the hard drive, then loads it back into ram when it is needed again. The registry is the part of the operating system that ponts to all the locations of different files that are used by the applications and the operating system itself. When thse files are fragmented, it just means that each file is stored over varying physical locations on the hard drive. So when the computer needs to load them up the hard drive needs to move the drive head backwards and forwards across the disk platters to get a file, rather than getting it from one location on the disk. The paging file (and any other file) can get very fragmented when the hard drive gets full, as the only free space left is physcially scattered all over the disk. This sort of issue is not fixed by restoring the os, neither would restoring be able to defragment the registry. If you go to 'Accessories' then 'System Tools' then 'Disk Defragmenter' it will tell you if the drive needs defragmenting. If it does you may need to clear up more space on the hard drive for it to defragment properly, and make sure that it doesn't quickly become fragmented again. - Another issue is too many background processes being loaded up at once. Many applications after you install them will set up a little process to load up when you computer is booted ( Adobe is major culprit), which will run in the background and peform tasks such as checking for updates, making booting applications faster and other only slightly useful things. It's fine if there is just a few of them, but there can be dozens of them unnecessarily running all the time in the background tasking up ram and generally slowing things down. You can see what they are by opening the 'Run' command from the 'Start' menu and typing in 'msconfig' - then going to the 'Startup' tab. Generally speaking, none of the startup items listed are actually necessary for running your computer -they are just little widgets added by installed applications, not the operating system. You can google each one and see if you want it to run in the background - otherwise just untick the boxs next to each name and you PC will startup and run faster. - One other issue is the registry itself just becoming clogged up and bloated, which just generally slows the PC down. This is best fixed by formatting the hard drive and reinstalling everything from scratch. It seems like drastic action, but it's not so bad as long as you back up everything in advance. There are lots of guides on websites to talk you through it - but obviously easier if you have another PC to back up things to. It can really speed up your PC (for a while, but needs to be repeated, every 6-12 months I find).
OP, what is your current hardware/computer setup? What operating system do you have installed and what other software do you have installed in addition to the OS (Office, trading software, additional programs, etc) What CPU & memory do you have? How full is your HDD? Try right clicking on 'My Computer', Properties, Advanced, Performance then change your system performance to Adjust for Best Performance. Next set your page file to system managed size (requires restart). After the restart, right click on My Computer, Manage, Services then look for Themes. Open Themes then click stop and change from Automatic to Disabled. Restart again.
PageDefrag v2.32 - paging files only defrag "One of the limitations of the Windows NT defragmentation interface is that it is not possible to defragment files that are open for exclusive access. Thus, standard defragmentation programs can neither show you how fragmented your paging files or Registry hives are, nor defragment them. Paging and Registry file fragmentation can be one of the leading causes of performance degradation related to file fragmentation in a system." http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897426.aspx CrapCleaner and/or other cleaners, NB with CC - possibly others, uncheck the 'Old prefetch data' from being cleaned HijackThis will do a scan and identify what's starting up when your computer starts and what's continuing to run. this isn't anti-virus and doesn't flag virus or other threats, problems, only lists what it finds. there are other utilities or using Task Manager/Processes although you need to be a techie to understand what's going on. http://free.antivirus.com/hijackthis/ hd defragger i'm using - how do you know they're any good ? Defraggler will defrag the unused space ??? http://www.piriform.com/defraggler last place to check presuming you're running firewall software is what applications are listed there and which if any have access to the internet and remove or block those you think shouldn't run. disallow ALL auto updates
Get a crowbar and your wallet out, pry out some $ and buy an operating system disk. Learn to format and install it... do that every so often and you will be so much better off...
There comes a time that you should consider: Your computer may be infected by virus or affected by the many applications that you installed (and their auto updates), and the many websites you have visited. Is it worth your time to trying to pin point the cause? You may be going down a rabbit hole, and spend many many hours trying to understand it and fix it. Or rather, spend the time/effort to focus on a clean install of the OS, and all your trading apps, and migrating your data (e.g. via WinZip). When you do a clean install, your computer should be as fast as it is supposed to be. New disk drives are not that expensive these days.
What antivirus are you currently running on the computer ? Go download the free version of malwarebytes and run a full system scan. Quarantine and then delete what ever it finds. http://www.malwarebytes.org/