I took it upon myself to repair my Mother's Dell Insparon Laptop while she is away so she stops whining about how slow it runs. So far, she has downloaded a bunch of "smily" ads and got herself some adware. Using Trend Micro, that problem was dealt with, but now a new one has come around. The computer is running slower than I have ever seen before. The strangest part is that there is plenty of Cpu usage (only 6 or 7 is being used at any given time) and the Page file isn't even one quarter to being full, yet I would click on My Computer, and Literally 5 minutes later it would pop up. Its as if the hard drive isn't even trying.
Solutions I've tried:
-Disk defrag: Made a little faster, but not much
-Better Anti-virus: I have Bit Defender on my compy, so I put it on hers because I like it a lot better than Trend Micro. (Already caught 1 more virus than Trend)
---The only problem is that the virus scan is also affected by the slowness and runs at 1 file every 3 seconds.
-Attempted Disk Clean up: Only got 5% before it froze.
-Stopped some processes: Using MSconfig and Task Mngr, I turned 75 processes into 50, only getting rid of the ones that are not needed to operate. All of the other running ones are around 5,000k or less, except Explorer.exe which is at 33,000k.
-Removed 10 unused programs.
After all of this, the computer still takes forever to move. I feel that there might be a bug in Explorer because it is the window operations that take the longest. Anyway, any help on the matter would be apreciated. I have had a Virus scan going on for 5 hours now, and it has only scanned 2000 files. If you need any other info, please ask or email. Thank you.