Suddlenly slow internet; AVG, spybot no help

[BrettMud]

Hello, first of all, thanks in advance for any suggestions. Yesterday, I got into work and my pc started struggling with its internet connection. Everything is significantly a bit slower -- from pages loading to downloads (I attempted to download a new version of iTunes as a test and it took an incredible a amount of time).

I have a laptop--a Compaq Presario 2100, AMD Athlon XP2400+, 1.79 GHz, 448 MB RAM--and am running XP. I ran AVG Free and Spybot and turned up nothing out of the ordinary (cleaned up what spybot suggested and there was no differnence). Tried Ad-Aware, too, and at the rate it was going, the full scan would have taken a couple of days.

I'm at my wit's end here and would dearly love to avoid a re-formatting. I'm not too experienced with troubleshooting, tried a System Restore, but nothing changed.

Any help would be greatly apprieciated. Thanks,
Brett

Btw, I didn't install or download anything, or visit any sites of the ordinary, that would hint at anything unusual happening.

UPDATE: My laptop's fan is now jumping into overdrive even with just minimal programs running. Something weird is happening here ...

[dl65]

BrettMud...... Do you use your laptop in a unusually dusty enviroment ? Perhaps the blades are loaded up with dust and simplly cant keep the machine cool enough .  Does it appear to be running hotter than usual ?
Do you have any temperature monitoring software installed so you could check ?

dl65  

[GX1_Man]

You might want to check your running processes also, now and at a fresh reboot, with Task Manager.

[tmml]

sometimes the antispyware programs conflict. all three trying to scan everything and protect everything. try deleating one of them. this happened with me when i had spybot, adware, norton, and defender on my computer.

it might help to disable one of the programs. i purchased spy sweeper and deleted spybot and adware. now my connection speeds are back to normal



tmml

[Zylstra]

sometimes the antispyware programs conflict. all three trying to scan everything and protect everything. try deleating one of them. this happened with me when i had spybot, adware, norton, and defender on my computer.

it might help to disable one of the programs. i purchased spy sweeper and deleted spybot and adware. now my connection speeds are back to normal



tmml

You should only have 1 Antivirus scanner, 1 firewall, and 1 Antispy scanner running at the same time. Having so many does overwork your processor, hard drive, and entire computer itsself. You should avoid this. Go ahead and turn off all unnessasary protection. (You do not nessasarily need to uninstall it if you are not sure that you want to do that. Just stop it from starting in the options. If you run a scan of your computer with two scans going at once, you can expect it to go slow, it would go faster to scan sepratly)

[drdelia]

All I can say is that I feel sorry for you. I had the same problem, only on a PC.  And, to make it worse, whenever I tried to download an anti spyware program, the computer would shut down and restart and forget about the download. Finally, one dark and dreary night, it happened.  Page after page of sites started to appear, one after the other. a-d-a-w-a-r-e or someting like this.  Then, when I tried to email a friend for help, a picture of an ocean liner appeared in the middle of the email page! Apparently an ad for vacations or something, but I'd had it by then.  I shut down the system, and myself until morning. I sent my son out to buy me some virus guards and such.  As soon as I downloaded some type of all purpose guard, and watched in horrification a my 100MB memory went to 238KB, the red light started flashing: virus, virus, can't delete file.
  So I had to reformat and reformat and still don't know what the best protection is to stop this nightmare from reoccuring.  I hope you have better luck than I did
Dr.D

[GX1_Man]

Tried Ad-Aware, too, and at the rate it was going, the full scan would have taken a couple of days.

It sounds like you have a problem that could be helped by running Hijack This and posting the full log file here. Either zip it up or use several posts to get it all.

[BrettMud]

Sorry I've taken a little while to respond. Thanks, all, for your helpful suggestions. I ended, finally, by reformatting, and it's taken me a little while to re-download and copy my old software and files ... and get things back up and running. Needless to say, the reformatting worked great and things are back to normal. I suppose it was about time I did so anyway.

This is a great site ... thanks for being so prompt with the help. I'm sure a Hijack This log and step-by-step fix would have helped, but the chugger needed reformatting anyway (2 and a half years without).

All the best,
B

[GX1_Man]

A good format and reinstall will fix most Windows problems (for a while anyway).