my computer becomes very slow, and my friend says maybe something like malware or spyware has attacked my computer. how can i totally get rid of those bad things if my computer indeed is attacked. Thanks for any advice.

Mary La., January 2010

besides the normal firewall i use spyhunter3 and malware two good programmes very easy to use and keeps the laptop safe from spyware,virus,trojans etc

phil, May 2010

you need latest veresion of antispyware software to get rid of spywares. Still problem with the same, you need good technician to resolve this issue.

http://www.iYogi.co.uk

kevin, February 2010

Some things to check:

Do you have any "real time" virus protection? That can REALY bog you down. Try to exclude some stuff if you can't turn that feature off. The main culprits here are several antivirus that constantly monitor your computer activity, scan every files as they are accessed, analyses the behaviour of every processes to try to catch abnormal or suspicious activity. This can eat up to 90% of your CPU power, maybe even more. In that aspect, Norton AV is a major offender.
Cure: uninstall that overly agressive AV and switch to another one that is less invasive and agressive.

How many applications and processes are running just after you boot up? Launch the Task Manager and look in the process tab.
A typical count can go around 20 up to 50 depending on your configuration and what programms you need/use.
(I have 40, including 8 for my antivirus, and 15 others like media players and some gadgets)
When you do nothing but look at the task manager, what is the CPU load? It should be close to 0% for most users.
Apart from the "Iddle process", what process uses the most CPU? Do you recognise that process?

Your drive(s) may be cluttered with to many useless files. Launch the drive cleanup utility.

Take a look in your Windows folder and delete the folders with names that start and end with "$" that are older than 2 months.
You may easily have more than 100 of those. The only impact will be that you will no longer be able to uninstall the older windows updates.
Empty any temp and tmp folders.
Empty your recicle bin.
If your drive is cluttered with to many files and you start to run out of place, your performences will decline.

Launch a defragmentation. When files are strewn all over the drive in many scattered pieces, they take much longer to access.
If you have an agressive AV that does invasive real time protection, the problems are compounded.

Look at the applications that start with Windows. Any loader, starter or "stubs" from things like Office? You don't need those. It only saves you one or two second when you start something like MS Words less that 5 minutes after you started your system.

Take a look at your installed applications. Uninstall those that you no longer use, or that you don't remember ever using. DON'T touch any driver!

Kualinar, February 2010

There are many factors that can result in a slow computer performance. Hope you are not really attacked by spyware or malware somthing like that. But if you are indeed attacked, please use a good spyware removal tool to detect and remove the malicious items from your computer. It's safer to have an antispyware to protect you, i think. :)
http://ezinearticles.com/?How-to-Remove-Spyware-From-Your-PC-in-One-Minute?&id=3562289

Tommy, January 2010