Computer Whizzes....

[myflow 10+ year member]

don't use limewire. if you're going to d/l shit, go with torrents or something. limewire's bad bad bad news.

 

[BoomBoomBoy 10+ year member]

Once your puter is pretty much fubar'd, about the only thing that makes it fresh as a baby's butt is to reformat the HDD.

 

[Eugenics 5,000+ posts]

with the google pack you get 6 months of norton free. //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/fyi.gif.9f1f679348da7204ce960cfc74bca8e0.gif

 

[IamDeMan 5,000+ posts]

Run defrag, disk checker, empty out the temporary internet files and history, run virus scan, uninstall programs that you no longer use or havent used in a while, get windows updates...
start there and if that doesnt help start looking at your hardware

Best free antivirus program

AVG Antivirus

Best Adware scanner

Spybot S&D

you have to do a couple things but its free and it works great.

Windows Defender owns all adware scanners, but X2 on AVG

 

[bigbangtheory 5,000+ posts]

AVG sucks ...
AOL Active Virus Shield is the best free AV ... Avira #2 ...

Whats wrong with AVG? Thats what I am running and seems to be fine, but I really havent tested the waters if you get my drift.

 

[bdawson72 5,000+ posts]

then what is good jmac

 

[sue bee 10+ year member]

don't listen to any of the advice you have heard. create a new partition on your harddrive and install a fresh copy of windows there. boot from said copy of windows. have access to all old files without reformating the hdd. also, the best spyware remover is spybot s&d. adware is trash. avg has holes. plus spybot is free. i am the goodness.

 

[orphe 10+ year member]

CHeck how many programs you have running in your system tray (lower right hand corner of your start menu)

the more programs you have runnin there the slower your computer may preform. This is very helpful when starting up your PC

Also got to start run and type in MSCONFIG. go the the startup tab

turn off any program you wish so that it wont start up when you boot your PC.

ALSO if you can find a program called COUNTERSPY DL and use it ASAP. **** good at cleaning of viruses and spyware