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Can a virus make a computer slow down?

J

jyates

Diamond Member
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
 
Did You scandisk and defrag?... And turning all the Win98 animations can speed things up as well (use tweakui, it's on the Win98 Disk under tools/reskit/powertoy/ right click on tweakui.inf and select install)... And go to the System Information Startup Configuration and turn off all but the very necessitys (systray, scan registry, and Antivirus).
 
May I suggest you also emty out all of your Windows/Temp file, Temporary Internet Files, and Cookies. Go to Adaware website and download and run adaware 6.0. Also, you can turn off SMART in the BIOS, and just go to the drive's website, download and run thier drive utilities.

Hope this helps.
 
It sure can't hurt!

I'm not talking a little sluggish here guys....I'm
talking SLUGGISH for a 1.7ghz P4 machine!
 
Originally posted by: HumbleFish
Did You scandisk and defrag?... And turning all the Win98 animations can speed things up as well (use tweakui, it's on the Win98 Disk under tools/reskit/powertoy/ right click on tweakui.inf and select install)... And go to the System Information Startup Configuration and turn off all but the very necessitys (systray, scan registry, and Antivirus).
Click to expand...

A p4 system should not have any problems with the windows animations in 98.

I have always heard that enabling SMART disks slows things down a little, but I wouldn't expect it to be that bad. Also on that note, the fact that you are getting a warning about the disk on boot-up, indicates an obvious problem with the HD. I agree with getting the utilities from the drive mfg to investigate further. A bad HD could certainly cause you these problems.

Good luck
 
Virus's can definatley slow the computer down. I had a P4 1.7GHZ machine that felt slower than a Pentium 166. A reformat fixed the problem. It was a virus, but I couldn't get Norton to complete a virus check. (It slowed down the computer to the point to which for every virus norton would detect, two would pop up.) just do a virus scan first before you do anything harsh. Also, check Sisoft sandra. That can check diskspeed.

I'd reccomend doing a drive fitness test on that thing. The harddrive might be dying if Smart starts balking at you.
 
I'll take a look and see what the make of the hard drive is and download
the tools for it.

Thanks,
Jim
 
Originally posted by: FishTankX
Virus's can definatley slow the computer down. I had a P4 1.7GHZ machine that felt slower than a Pentium 166. A reformat fixed the problem. It was a virus, but I couldn't get Norton to complete a virus check. (It slowed down the computer to the point to which for every virus norton would detect, two would pop up.) just do a virus scan first before you do anything harsh. Also, check Sisoft sandra. That can check diskspeed.

I'd reccomend doing a drive fitness test on that thing. The harddrive might be dying if Smart starts balking at you.
Click to expand...

I would not run Drive Fitness Test if it is not an IBM/Hitachi, it may ruin your drive. I think the seagate utilities will do generic tests on other drives.

Let us know what you find out.

 
Originally posted by: Curley
Originally posted by: FishTankX
Virus's can definatley slow the computer down. I had a P4 1.7GHZ machine that felt slower than a Pentium 166. A reformat fixed the problem. It was a virus, but I couldn't get Norton to complete a virus check. (It slowed down the computer to the point to which for every virus norton would detect, two would pop up.) just do a virus scan first before you do anything harsh. Also, check Sisoft sandra. That can check diskspeed.

I'd reccomend doing a drive fitness test on that thing. The harddrive might be dying if Smart starts balking at you.
Click to expand...

I would not run Drive Fitness Test if it is not an IBM/Hitachi, it may ruin your drive. I think the seagate utilities will do generic tests on other drives.

Let us know what you find out.
Click to expand...

Will do.......I worked on a computer for a friend here a while back that defintely got a virus because
she didn't keep her Anti Virus updated and it got her and her machine was crawling compared
to what it should have been doing and I did a format and reinstalled Windows 98se for her and it was
still slow. So I did the low level (write zero's to the hard drive) format and reinstalled and it worked fine.
So apparently, and I don't know why, a format doesn't "kill" the virus or the effects of it but it appears
that a low level format will take care of it.

Jim

 
Well I didn't specifically mean IBM's drive fitness test, but now that I think about it, sounds that way.. 🙁

Anyways what I mean is that every manufacturer should have their utilities with a set of tests to see if the HD's O.K. or not. Maybe you should run some.
 
what is the difference between format and low level format? I've formatted drives before, but it sounds like your "low level format".go to dos type format c: erases all contents.
 
Formatting from DOS is merely destroying the records of where the files are on the harddrive. Thus, it looks blank, but it's really not. You just overwrite when you put new files onthe compute.r

Low level reformat write's 0's across the whole HD, making it a completly blank slate.
 
The drive is a western digital and I ran their lifeguard utility on it
and the test crapped out very quickly.

I found out that my friend has been seeing the "s.m.a.r.t. error" for about
a year but never thought anything about it!

I've got a replacement hd coming from WD and we'll see how it goes!

Thanks,
Jim
 
if you're getting a SMART warning, then you need to get your data off that drive ASAP and prepare to get a new hdd. smart technology was designed to give you a heads up when your hard drive is about to fail. sometimes you only have one reboot left in the drive, other times you have two weeks worth of reboots. back up your data before doing anything else. slap in a new hdd and if it still moves slowly, you have a hardware problem outside of the hdd.
 
Originally posted by: carolinaviking
if you're getting a SMART warning, then you need to get your data off that drive ASAP and prepare to get a new hdd. smart technology was designed to give you a heads up when your hard drive is about to fail. sometimes you only have one reboot left in the drive, other times you have two weeks worth of reboots. back up your data before doing anything else. slap in a new hdd and if it still moves slowly, you have a hardware problem outside of the hdd.
Click to expand...

Agreed. Back up you data, if it is of any value to you.
 
Originally posted by: jyates
The drive is a western digital and I ran their lifeguard utility on it
and the test crapped out very quickly.

I found out that my friend has been seeing the "s.m.a.r.t. error" for about
a year but never thought anything about it!

I've got a replacement hd coming from WD and we'll see how it goes!

Thanks,
Jim
Click to expand...

Geez, she'd better be glad that it survived this long. Anything that interrupts the boot process like that asking to continue is not a good thing. Too many people aren't educated on what "normal" is for a computer. Like the horrible groaning/grinding of a dying power supply fan - someone's PC was doing that, but he just thought it was annoying, and put up with it for...probably 2 years. I replaced it, and the PC was almost silent. That dying fan must have been doing only around 300rpms.
 
Yes it can. It can slow down your computer by clogging your hard disk and create invalid files. It also can hurt your computer
 
I have actually made a virus that did just that (I never sent it to anyone, it was just good programming practice), among other things. The way it would make the computer slow down is by making hidden programs repeatedly open in the background every few minutes. Eventually, the system became very bogged. Also, it would create garbage files to eat up any extra HDD space, which could also cause slowdowns.

HDTach is a good program to check the performance of a drive. If the SMART alarm is going off, that is very bad. If there is some sort of error code that it gives you, you should definitely dive a little deeper into the meaning of it.

However, I doubt that it is a virus. Try defragmenting; it does wonders for a system that hasn't had it done in a long time. Actually, if she will allow it, you should format the HDD and start fresh. Setup the system so the OS has it's own partition, if it isn't like that already. That boosts performance quite a bit.
 
yep, i once had a virus that purposely slowed the comp down eating up all available resources.. seriously the cpu load was at 100% ALL the time 😛

eventually got rid of it manually and finished it off with an anti-virus software

was a pain though the thing kept making copies of itself to all kinds of dif files and putting itself back in startup (msconfig) when i had removed it
 
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