Computer help needed: Why is my computer running soooo SLOW? (sm)

[Sue G in PA]

A bit of history...got this computer about 5 years ago (it's a Dell). 2 years later it caught a virus and was basically unusable. We kept it and used the computers our cyber school loaned us. Since then, dh had a computer guru friend of his wipe out the hard drive, clean it basically and reboot all the programs. Basically, we had a new computer. For a months of so, it was fine. Now, it takes forever to boot up, forever to get on Internet (we have cable ISP so it shouldn't/never did take long to load pages), programs crash, I can't open files, etc. We have a current virus protection and I've run scans just to be sure...everything is A-ok. I've run Spyware programs, etc. Any ideas as to what is going on? Need more memory? I don't know. Any help is appreciated. TIA

[GothicGyrl]

5 years old, previous virus, and then reinstalled clean?

Old. That and you either have another virus that isn't being picked up by your virus scanner (I use AVG, the best out there and it is free), or you've got spyware.

Check your add/remove programs--see what's installed. You don't say, but I'm going to speak as though I think I know what the problem might be.

Are you running any kind of Norton's or Macafee? If so, uninstall them now. They eat your computer systems memory and pretty much kill a pc. Especially Norton's firewall/antivirus--they pretty much make your pc unusable.

And you probably do need a memory upgrade, especially if you are running Norton's on XP. 5 years ago, Dell, it's either XP or ME.. and if it is running ME, well--norton's just kills all of your memory.

[Txmom]

nt