very slow pc when starting up.

[AdrianS]

Hi

My laptop pc has become very slow on starting up and it takes a long time to load pages for quite a few minutes when first using it.
Also the hard drive icon is constantly flashing and working for some time before it settles down.

I also get messages of a long running script and also an occasional message about managing add-ons.

I am assuming a lot is trying to load up when starting - how can find out what is loading up and also what do I need to load up?

I have avast antivirus which I have had for a couple of years and I am aware this slows the pc down and I am just wondering if this is deliberately
making it worse! I keep getting messages telling me "x" amount of programmes are slowing the pc down and other messages I assume trying to get me to buy
a paid for version of avast.

Any advice gratefully received

Adrian

 

[Deleted account 190920001]

What operating system?

You probably have several things wrong. Old hard drive getting slow. Laptop full of crap you never use and by the warnings you have malware on there.
Go to start and run or if vista win 7 in the search type msconfig and press return. Startup tab will tell you what runs at startup. Uncheck if you don't want it. Might also be worth looking at the services tab as well and see if you can shut stuff down in there.
Next up go download malwarebites and install it, disable avast at this time and run a scan to get rid of your malware.
If your laptop is getting old you could probably use a new drive which will speed things up.
Lastly if you use Google Chrome disable the run in background. It's a really nice feature but if you have a lot of extensions on an old machine it makes them really slow to boot.

 

[Boxergs]

Download ccleaner and run it

 

[stever1]

do a virus check, clean the registry, and de-frag the HDD.

 

[AdrianS]

Will try the above advice!

Cheers

Adrian

 

[Bendy toy]

My little Samsung Netbook eventually became unusable with XP home. I reformatted the disc and reinstalled but it was still very slow. I think all the updates just closed up the OS so older machines could not usably run it. My brother also runs XP but he's never done the updates and it still runs fine. He does of course use an anti malware but I don't know which one.

I eventually installed Ubuntu on the Samsung and it never looked back until the screen fell apart. It's about to get a new lease of life running a video loop in the shop window so unless there is a Linux subtitle generator it might have to go back to Windoze.

 

[andysdad]

All good advice.

One other suggestion - make sure the Hard Drive isn't nearly full - if there is only a small space left, the OS may have to shuffle bits in and out (RAM disk) and performance drops away rapidly.

Have you had multiple different antivirus programs? They can argue with each other. Norton is difficult to remove completely - they have an uninstaller program on their website to help remove it completely.

HTH