[SOLVED!] Laptop slows down - why?

[janas19]

Hello good people of AT! I have a computer problem question, and I dutifully searched through about ten pages of threads, but I couldn't find any information on this topic so I thought to start a new thread.

I have an MSI Wind U100 netbook. I mainly use it for web browsing, office work, and light computing. Up until now, for about 6 months time, it has done these tasks with no problem, but just in the last week it seems like the laptop has gotten noticeably slower. When I open Youtube, for example, it now takes about 20 seconds to load up the search bar, whereas just a month ago, it would be almost instantaneous. I also notice that when I open my "Downloads" folder on my hard drive, the JPEGS of the files take a good 30 seconds to load. The CPU/hard drive now take a long time to spool up and finish common tasks like opening office programs.

I'm having a hard time understanding why this is happening, because I haven't done anything out of the usual in my routine (as far as I know) and the laptop has always worked just fine! But this slow-down is perplexing me.

More info: I did a defrag of my hard drive about two weeks ago. It was working fine then. I put my laptop in sleep mode alot instead of shutting down, is that a problem?

What is going on here? Can anyone chime in on this?

Thanks so much in advance!!

 

[corkyg]

Download a freecopy of Malwarebytes and run a full scan. Your netbook is exhibiting symptoms of malware contamination. I just cleaned up an old Compaq C700 for a friend yesterday. It found 274 infected files/objects. After deleting those, I rebooted, then did a Registry scrub with CCleaner (another freebie), and then defragged the drive, off line and on line. Free breathing restored.

 

[janas19]

Download a freecopy of Malwarebytes and run a full scan. Your netbook is exhibiting symptoms of malware contamination. I just cleaned up an old Compaq C700 for a friend yesterday. It found 274 infected files/objects. After deleting those, I rebooted, then did a Registry scrub with CCleaner (another freebie), and then defragged the drive, off line and on line. Free breathing restored.

That's super helpful, will try! Thanks!

 

[nitrous9200]

Sounds like the symptoms of a bad hard drive, but it could very well be a severe malware infection (possibly a rootkit involved - which might not be detected by Malwarebytes).

If you look at the hard drive light while the system is running slowly and it's either constantly on/flashing or blinks in a pattern (light blinks on once every two seconds), that would sound like bad sectors that the drive is running into, which would cause the drive to slow down and keep retrying to read that one bad sector. Only way to tell for sure is to run a program called spinrite which costs $89 (good to have but you don't really need to buy it).

The last possible cause I can think of would be your hard drive switching to PIO mode. If your drive causes a certain number of errors, Windows switches the drive back to a much slower transfer mode, which would cause everything to slow down dramatically. I've seen it happen before, and the fix is pretty simple - look here: http://winhlp.com/node/10
In the beginning of that text, where it says quick solution, the instructions are there; you have to download a file, run it and then reboot your machine.

 

[janas19]

Sounds like the symptoms of a bad hard drive, but it could very well be a severe malware infection (possibly a rootkit involved - which might not be detected by Malwarebytes).

If you look at the hard drive light while the system is running slowly and it's either constantly on/flashing or blinks in a pattern (light blinks on once every two seconds), that would sound like bad sectors that the drive is running into, which would cause the drive to slow down and keep retrying to read that one bad sector. Only way to tell for sure is to run a program called spinrite which costs $89 (good to have but you don't really need to buy it).

The last possible cause I can think of would be your hard drive switching to PIO mode. If your drive causes a certain number of errors, Windows switches the drive back to a much slower transfer mode, which would cause everything to slow down dramatically. I've seen it happen before, and the fix is pretty simple - look here: http://winhlp.com/node/10
In the beginning of that text, where it says quick solution, the instructions are there; you have to download a file, run it and then reboot your machine.

Awesome! Thumbs up to you for those tips!

 

[janas19]

Just another quick thought, is it possible that Google Chrome apps can be malware? I downloaded a "Craigslist Helper" app, that's really the only file I can think of that I gave permission to in the last week...

Did Chrome store let me down on this one?

 

[janas19]

*Update*

Ran a full scan of Malwarebytes with updated database, said there were 0 infects.

Then I ran CCleaner Registry Cleaner- it said there were 332 MB of junk files.

Deleted those files and the difference was almost instantaneous! My netbook feels light and fast again.

Guess that Registry cleaning really did the trick! Thanks people.