My title pretty much sums it up. Any help would be appreciated.

Our laptop recently picked up a virus that wiped out some dll file that caused us to not be able to connect to the internet. No matter what we did, no connection could be established. So, we tried the Windows XP install disk and used the repair function, it found no errors but after it was completed, we still could not access the internet because of the missing dll file. After trying all of the basics, we decided to crash the system and start out fresh.

What we have is a HP Pavillion ZE-5185 Laptop with a Pentium 4 2.40 GHz processor and 512 mb of RAM and a 60 gig hard drive. We had to wipe the hard drive completely clean and re-install Windows XP Home Edition back onto the computer. We backed everything up that we needed to save and after re-installation of everything (including service pack 2 and approx. 75 other updates), we re-booted the computer and it is running exceptionally slow. We have no add-ons like Webshots, screen savers or anything "extra" to slow it down since it is basically a fresh hard drive.

We have Automatic Updates activated and all other settings set at factory default.

Under the "My Computer" properties, the Used Space is 4.57 GB while the Free Space is 51.3 GB. Indexing Service is enabled along with Drive Compression.

Hitting "Ctrl Alt Delete" and looking at the "Performance" and then the "processes", the System Idle Process hovers between 78-88 while the CPU usage meter stays at around 16-20% until moving the mouse pointer around and then it spikes to about 60% CPU usage or sometimes as high as 100%. When you try to scroll a webpage, oh man, it takes about 3 minutes to scroll all the way down to the bottom. The programs that are running in the background consist of MSN, AIM, and AVG which were running before the wipe clean and never ever had a problem with it.

We have tried Defragmenting, Disk Clean-up, error checking, multiple re-starts, turning off any messenger service and all other programs and it still remains slower than the old Apple II's with 64k worth of memory. Is there anyone here that can help to get this computer running back to normal speed? Any and all help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks for the read.. I know it was long, just trying to give as much info as I possibly can.

hi and welcome to this site
we are working blind here so bare with us


to help others reply here too, I have a few questions:
- what is the time difference between switch'on to post in normal mode against switch'on to post in safemode(roughly that is)
- do you have all the updates done
- how many startups are enabled
- do you have lots of processes running
- is event viewer showing any errors

This post has been edited by fleamailman: Nov 18 2006, 05:54 PM

Thank you for the reply! as for your query, I am not too sure what you are speaking of. I know a little bit about the computer, but we work better with someone telling us over the phone what to do. If you would feel comfortable with letting us call you or you call me, could you PM me? Thanks so much!

I have ALL of the updates done.
I have 29 processes running but I don't know what half of them are.
I am not sure what to tell you on the other 3 items.

Nevermind, I just remembered how to check to see how many start up's I had running and it was a total of 5.

Sorry!

no problem, I pitch a little high at times
- ok, only five startups, if you disable them do you see a noticable change in computer speed
- back in task manager where you saw all those processes, how many are running
- when you say that the computer is slow give me an example of the slowness

Also ask the folks in the malware forum about this problem, with a reference to your boot records being infected. If you did a full format rather than a fdisk, you may still have a wee b....r hiding there and specifically draining your resources.

After reinstalling only XP, and before reinstalling any progs or 3rd party stuff, do a defrag, then a chkdsk on a reboot to check for bad sectors et al... to allow XP to set up its nest the way it likes. Then allow the reinstall of any and all progs to go according to XP's dictates...it's just easier that way.

Then do another defrag, etc.

Any changes?

This post has been edited by b1caez01: Nov 20 2006, 12:37 AM

Not sure if anyone mentioned this, couldn't read it all in class

So to try and help ya out, on my computer whenever I haven't reinstalled my nvidia driver the computer seems to jump around abit and doesn't perform as quickly. Also if you got on the internet without installing a virus software, on the new install, then you prolly have one nasty virus.

If you did get on the internet right after installing xp and you can't seem to figure out what or where it is then I would do another system reinstall.

Check my sig for helpful information and great downloads, Avast can help delete or stop most parasites.

I'm sry if it doesn't help much