Very slow Sony Vaio

[Titus33]

Hi,

I have a 4 year old Sony Vaio laptop, that suddenly became very slow. I have noticed the following:
- The time taken to boot-up the PC is probably tripple what it used to be
- I can hear that the PC is very active even when there are no programs running. The CPU usage is constantly varying between 0-30%
- I have about 30% space available on my harddrive. I have also deleted several programs to try and speed up the PC to no avail
-When starting the pc the "start-up tune" is now also very fragmented

I have done the following:
- Ive defragmeneted the harddrive
- I have installed Norton's anti virus program
- I've purchased an external harddrive where I moved all my music and photos.

I would appreciate any help
Regards

[Sir Mark]

Hi, i just noticed your post and its errily reminescent of what I went through this a.m. w/my laptop.Turned out to be MS Antivirus.Malware that runs on startup and disguises itself as a XP Antivirus '08 software.Tells you you have viruses and gets you to click for upgrades,Bottom line? Bad news...Brought my laptop to its knees within days.I do not know if you have this but it sounds like malware/adware or a combination thereof.Mcaf%e missed this and so did Defender.the fix for me was a google search for MS Antivirus and then an introduction to bleepingcomputor.com where I not only found removal instructions but an explanation as to what I was dealing with.. goodluck! Mark

[Beastmanh]

Sounds to me like you have a process that starts up at boot time, that is eating all your memory up... The computer being very "active" is your system using virtual memory because your system RAM is taken up by this rogue process.. You should hit ctrl > alt > del and click on the processes tab.. Then click on the letters "CPU" TWICE. That will automatically put the process that is using the most cpu at the top of the list. When you find out what the process is called, please post it here. :)

Cheers,

~Mike

P.S. Do this when your computer is showing the symptoms you are talking about.

[mackone]

You say you have disabled unnecessary apps, disable unnecessary Apps running in the background - Try disabling one at a time in msconfig/startup.

Norton did/does slow down my PC running XP Pro. However it seems to be back to normal - but only if I use the 'Classic. Appearance. Too soon to be certain... But the effect is startling... Anyone else see this?

[Beastmanh]

Yes for sure Norton is a memory HOG... and in my opinion doesn't do its job very well either.... I use Avast... Its free... It works... And you can schedule boot time scans, which I like. The FIRST thing I would do is uninstall Norton and install Avast... but its up to you.

Cheers,

~Mike

[TheBuzzer]

I would say format your laptop with a xp sp3 stripstreamed cd. Most likely the laptop got something bad that is wasting cpu cycles also 4 year old laptop might mean your system registry got a lot of leftover junk from uninstalled programs.

Formatting is the best way to gain speed back to your old laptop