Can a virus make a computer slow down?

[jyates]

Hi all,

A friend brought me over a computer (P4 1.7ghz) saying the modem wasn't connecting.
She was right.....never would connect so I popped her a new pci modem in and it works
fine.

During fooling with it I noticed it took longer than usual for the P4 speed machine to boot
and it felt "sluggish" when in Windows 98se going from place to place. Like how quickly
the start menu pops up when clicked. Just "sluggish".

She had Norton's 5.0 Antivirus on it and I noticed they had about 7 files quarrentined.

I ran a complete scan and nothing showed to be infected but I'm wondering if she
was infected and it's slowed down her computer.

I also noticed that the S.M.A.R.T. utility on the motherboard is giving a warning about the
hard drive and you have to push the enter key in order to continue the boot process.

Is there a program out there that can check the tranfer speed of the hard drive?
It may be that the sluggish part is coming from the hard drive that may be having problems.

Thanks in advance for any and all help.

Jim

 

[Bulldog13]

Yes, a virus can do that.

Use Housecall from McCaffee - it's an on-line virus scanner. Search google for it.

I believe Sisoft Sandra can gauge HD speeds.

Peace

 

[SwampsterFL]

If SMART is giving a warning on boot . . . your best bet is to believe it! Get another HDD, and mirror all the data from this drive before it quits completely with all your data.

 

[Nothinman]

If SMART is saying the drive is going to fail, it will, replace it ASAP. Which will probably also fix the slowness problems.