It's running so slowly it has almost stopped!

So far I have:

Run a virus checker - both with Threat Fire and with AVG Free
Run Spy Bot search and destroy - no threats found
Hoovered out the fan dust
Defragged
Cleared out temporary files
Run a registry check and got rid of excess files
Tried to restore it back to a date a couple of months ago, but it won't let me

It still takes an age to load up, when you click on something it can take up to half an hour to load the screen up.

Any ideas as to what to do next?
Am I going to have to roll back to the start and format it? If so, how do I do that?

press ctrl +alt+del, on there you will find an option which will show every process that is running.

Most of these you will be able to shutdown (a few of them may even be from stuff you got rid of ages ago)

Any problem pop into work with it and will show you how to do it.

You know me, im better with "hands on " :hihi:

I've tried that, the only things which seem to be sucking the most resources are the AVG and the Spybot, but even then there's not much being used. From what I can tell, the memory isn't being stretched too much, there's about 20GB still free on the HDD and it's a mystery.

I can't get it to go online as its sooo slow to do anything, it won't let me get online.

is there anything with high cpu usage in the Processes bit of the task manager?

as it sounds a lot like a virus/spyware , are there any instances of iexplore.exe in task manager right after booting up?

An upgrade of RAM may solve the problem?

If its taking so long to start up it might be an idea looking at msconfig.

Start/Run/msconfig enter then a box comes up. If you go to the Startup tab have a look at some of the programs that come on with your comp and if there are any that look a bit odd uncheck them and they wont run on your next startup. Most of the things there might look weird but if you look under command it should tell you where the program's located and from there you can work out if its useful or not.

is there anything with high cpu usage in the Processes bit of the task manager?

as it sounds a lot like a virus/spyware , are there any instances of iexplore.exe in task manager right after booting up?

But Spybot didn't pick up on anything and it's usually good for spotting anything that should not be there.

There's nothing with particularly high cpu usage in task manager other than AVG free. The weird thing is that I've tried to uninstall AVG free and it seems to stick as part of the uninstall (so technically it won't let me uninstall it!).

An upgrade of RAM may solve the problem?

No not really, it was working fine until very recently, quite speedily.

are there any instances of iexplore.exe in task manager right after booting up?

Nope - can't see this in Task manager