Member Avatar for henryrodda

I am trying to sort out an issue with a 4 year old Toshiba satellite pro laptop with XP. I have the latest BT broadband and I have my other Sony laptop with vista connected with lightning fast page load speeds and download speeds. I open IE on the Toshiba and it takes maybe a minute to load a page, then it crashes if you write any more than a letter at a time in a search bar. to try and solve this I wanted to download google chrome, after an agonising 10 minutes I got to the download page and started the download but it came up with an error message saying cannot download chromesetup.exe cannot find webpage etc... FRUSTRATION!!! so I cannot see if it is a IE problem on the Toshiba or not because I cannot download another browser, I also tried firefox with the same results. Outlook is slow to load but fast to get emails, but when you click on an email to try and open the message it takes minutes to get a view of the message, the whole rest of the program crashes also. recently (last 10 minutes) stuff has started to stop working e.g. my documents was fine this morning and is now slow, laggy and the mouse is jittery, also I tried to create a new user account to see if it made any differnce and got nowhere the new user account window crashed.
I would be grateful for any help people can offer. thanks, Henry

  • 4 Contributors
  • 5 Replies
  • 193 Views
  • 17 Hours Discussion Span
  • Latest Post Latest Post by caperjack

Dani AI

Generated

Symptoms point to either malware (toolbars/BHOs), serious system-file corruption, or a failing disk — and they can coexist. is right to suspect spyware; and are also on track about using a log/rescue approach. Before doing anything else, back up personal files (Documents, mail PSTs, desktop) to an external drive so recovery stays possible.

Practical, ordered steps to try now:

  • From a working PC, download a trusted portable anti‑malware scanner to a USB stick and run it on the Toshiba (use a rescue/standalone scanner if the browser blocks downloads). If that fails, boot the laptop from rescue media and run offline scans.
  • Check Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc) in Safe Mode with Networking: look for processes with very high CPU, memory or disk use. Disable nonessential startup items with msconfig.
  • Verify free space on C: (less than ~10–15% free causes severe slowdowns) and run chkdsk c: /f /r (schedules on reboot). Run sfc /scannow to repair protected system files (XP may require the CD).
  • If GUI user-creation fails, try creating a temporary account from an elevated command prompt: net user TempUser /add and test whether problems persist under that new profile.

Outlook-specific checks:

  • Start Outlook in safe mode (outlook.exe /safe) to rule out add-ins. If mail view is slow or crashes, run the Inbox Repair tool (scanpst.exe) against the PST, and consider creating a new, empty profile and letting mail re-download rather than repairing a heavily corrupted PST.

Cautions and when to ask for logs:

  • Do not randomly delete items from a HijackThis-style log; post the log and ask for guidance. If disk errors or SMART failures appear, image the drive and replace it — continued use risks data loss. If initial scans don’t help, report back with Task Manager observations, available free disk space, and any rescue-scan results so advice can be more specific.

Recommended Answers

All 5 Replies

Member Avatar for techniner

You have been hit with spyware.

Chances are toolbars and BHO's are causing the slow down in your browser.

Post a hijackthis log.

Member Avatar for henryrodda

what logfile am i looking for I have found a list of application, internet explorer, security and system logs

Member Avatar for Bob_180_Bob

If you have trouble getting it to work, try starting in safe mode. If you still can not get it to work, use the other machine and go to ..
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/
Make a CD and use that to boot your machine and check for viruses with that.....

Member Avatar for caperjack

something tell me this thread should be move to the virus forum if we are to be following forum rules about hijack logs

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.