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when i wake up in the morning my Compaq Presario is very slow i have to wait 5 minutes just for a program to open up it has been doing this for a long time i used the hardware diagnostic included in the computer everything checks out fine but i want to know how to fix it being very slow i did a clean install of windows vista with the recovery discs that i made when i got the computer it was fine and a month later it began slow again/ i use disk cleanup and disc defragmenter then i restart and it is still slow i have no idea what to do i hope someone can help me i dont think i have any viruses i use microsoft security essentials but i dont know if it works i might have a virus and security essentials might not be powerful enough to detect it but i just want to fix the slowness on it should i recover my system to factory defaults and see what happens

Hi, One thing to try first is to startup in the safe mode and see if you have the same problem. If you do I would backup all my data to a cd. I would then reformat the drive and do a fresh install of the operating system. I would use AVG Free for my anti-virus (make sure you download the free version). Now before I reloaded any programs or data I would scan them with the anti-virus. I would not defrag more than once every three months and us the disk cleanup weekly. Link for AVG included. Good luck with your computer. http://free.avg.com/us-en/homepage

this can be fixed . just remove all unwanted programs and run a virus cleaner and make sure you do not have any adware let me know if you need more help

I agree with RJ713 on what you’ll need to do here. You likely have something running on your system you don’t want. Check out this article from Ars Download me II—Removing the remnants of the Web’s most dangerous search terms. Hopefully it will help you in the future.

Some classic reasons a computer slows down.

  1. It’s possible that your computer may have so many background programs running that there is not enough main memory to run your main programs.
  2. Your hard drive could be too full of data to function efficiently.
  3. Your computer could have a fragmented hard drive.
  4. If you have 256 MB of free system memory or less, or you like to play games, you may not have enough system memory to run your software efficiently.
  5. You could have old or conflicting Windows device drivers. Let me know if you have any other query.
  6. As each new Windows program is installed and uninstalled, it leaves behind parts of itself that can slow down or crash your computer.
  7. Your computer could be full of adware, spyware, viruses, or trojans.

Microsoft Security Essentials is good enough for virus detection. Do not worry about that. I would suggest that you restart your computer and scan it with Essentials in Safe Mode. Thats where all antivirus software programs are at their lethal best. Next, you can perform some registry cleaning as i guess you haven’t done that uptil now. There are numerous registry cleaners available like Reginout, CCleaner etc which work fine. But remember to always go for the paid ones as free software programs are just a scam 99% of the times. I personally use Reginout and it works well to give a much needed boost to my computer’s speed. If none of this helps then you should back up your data to a CD, format ALL of your partitions on your hard drive and then re-install Windows. And yes, consider using Windows 7. Vista itself is sort of a lagging thing and that might also be a contributing factor to why your computer has slowed down. Good Luck.