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This is obviously not a registry problem; my computer clearly has a virus. Among its symptoms I've found so far:
- Taking over a minute and a half to launch Firefox
- Suddenly opening a new tab in Firefox at odd intervals that leads to some spam website (it's a different site every time)
- Taking over two minutes to open Adobe Photoshop
- Taking over three minutes to open Windows Media Player
- Extremely slow scanning in HP Solution Center
- Unable to open HP Image Zone
- Unable to open WordPerfect
- Extremely slow AVG virus scanning; takes anywhere from four hours to more than a day
And the worst part is, once that virus scan is finally done, it never finds any viruses, meaning that this one has apparently disguised itself as something undetectable by antivirus software. If I want to get this thing off my computer, there's no way around it - I'd have to pay another $300 to have it done professionally.
What do you think? Should I keep pouring money into fixing a five-year-old PC that picks up a new virus every month, even when I can't do anything to stop it from happening? Or should I just save all my valuable files, junk this thing, and get a Mac?
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Your anti-virus program has failed to detect a virus after an extended scan. True, this might be one of the latest-generation polymorphic viruses, but those are rare since they are so very difficult to code correctly.
First hypothesis: long load times for so many different programs are usually caused by read errors, often caused by excessive dust on the circuit board. The dust can cause transient shorts in the data lines, scrambling the data packets being sent to/from the CPU. A soft, new horsehair paintbrush can sweep off the circuit boards from the top downwards. Ideally, a vacuum cleaner with a detachable hose can suck up the dust balls that will fall to the bottom. Compressed air cans will work, too, but the blow-back can be nasty.
Second hypothesis: hard drive head scratch. Hard drives work much like magnetic record players: a swing arm arcs the read/write heads across the concentric tracks of the magnetic platters. When loose ferrite particles gather on a head, that head will start damaging the data tracks on its platter. The problem gets worse each time that head is put to use. If you can find the archive operating system discs for your computer, then adding a new hard drive as the master, and demoting the old one as its slave will let you reinstall critical operating files on virgin tracks. From there, you can migrate your program and data files from the slave drive to the master drive at your leisure.
This second solution often works on pesky viruses, too, since they can only reside on a hard drive. Demoting that drive to a slave drive means it will rarely be called upon for instruction files; a slave drive is usually used as mindless data storage. ("Here, dumb slave, hold onto these huge files. And don't drop any!")
I really hope one of these solutions will work for you, JB. Your system has worked very well for you to this point, so there's little reason to junk it if the problem is merely data integrity errors.
Windows 7 is truly a great OS, and it'll take less time and hassle to get used to than Mac OS X.
(just my humble PC-biased opinion)
Id find some forums, and ask around. Post the symptoms and see if anyone suggests anything. It's saved my ass a few times when stuff goes wonky.
A decent patch for this is to either dual boot PC in it or to run a PC virtual machine. That was you will be able to run all of your old programs on your new system till you can buy new software.
I know from experience. Ive been using the same laptop since 2002. Thought I just switched it over to Ubuntu earlier this year.
Good luck.
Free is better.