Ok, I've had my DEll computer just over 2 years. Now It's been really painfully slow loading anything up e.g. AOL, for a few months.

First of all i thought it might be the fact that I have 60% of my album collection on Itunes, i think there is about 4000 songs.

But when I was temping at this firm I heard the IT guy say that anti virus software can really slow your PC down.

Anyway things have gone from bad to worse it crashes constantly. If I leave it on I can come back an hour later and it's frozen and will not shut down. So i have to switch it off at the socket.

When I switch it back on it seems to work fine, except for being really slow, but then will crash.

Does anyone know why this could be happening? I tried to defrag it and it crashed. I tried to remove unused software and that has made no diffrence. I'm really not sure what to do! :help:

Check for Spyware - Google "Spybot - Search & Destroy", then get rid of what it finds.

:)

Interesting Fact:

Dell turned over $13.9B this year
Dell Announced that it needs to spend $0.45B for fixing faulty equipment.
thats like 3.2%
That must be like 1/4 of their margin!

It's likely the system is overheating, dells have very little cooling infrastructure, it could be blocked with dust.

Last Month Very PC:

Turned over £26,000 of computers

Spend £40 repairing faulty equipment.

thats like 0.0015%

What OS are you using?

Maybe a silly question, but have you checked how much space is left on your hard drive ~ Start, My Computer, right click on C drive, click on Properties. Tell us exactly what information it gives.

You mention antivirus ~ which one are you using, is it up-to-date, and when did you last do a full scan? It's more likely that a virus or spyware would be slowing the pc down. Antivirus will slow things down when it's actually doing a scan.

another good anti spyware is adaware, made by lavasoft.

could be any number of reasons why this is happening as already mentioned.

i'd personally never recommend dell

Normally i would recommend a Repair Install (http://dhost.info/vidster/HTML/repair_install.htm) but i think Dell's only have the option to re-install the operating system.
After two years it could be better to re-install anyway. You would have to back up all your data/songs etc first though.

Alternatively you can try typing sfc /scannow in to the 'Run' box. This will launch the system file checker. It will scan your operating system and try to repair/replace any damaged/corrupt files.

Then take a look at This Guide (http://dhost.info/vidster/HTML/better_performance.htm). It has all the links you need to hopefully get your system running normally again.

Let us know how it goes :wink:

another good anti spyware is adaware, made by lavasoft
i cant say enough good things about this software:clap: