My PC went slow after a while

[TangoR34]

Basically my PC used to be very quick at the welcome screen and log on because I had overclocked it. But I have been away for 2 months then by the time I came back It said overclocking failed before going to windows and then it has been slower than ever!

My CPU: Intel Core 2 E6300

[d3fiant]

have you tried re-setting the OC in the bios, could be the cmos battery lost power and hence settings. Otherwise its a case of defraggin, checkin for virus/spyware and the likes

[Clunk]

The battery could have died, and reset your bios settings, and you may need to set things back up.

[TangoR34]

how do i re-set the OC?

[shaithis]

Exactly the same as you did so before......

[CooperXS]

Well I'm sure the battery has nothing to do with it. Clean the insides from dust, defragment HDD, use ccleaner to remove all the rubbish from OS. And for anycase it's better to have several days of stress test of the system to find out the sweet spot on the overclocking, then install the software you would really require very often and then make a restore point with any of the restore app just so you could reset all the states to this state if things will go wrong.

[speardane]

have you accepted any Windows upgrades?
Are there some new services running you don't want?

Windows update does appear to have some bugs... you say no to a particular upgrade, and it just does it anyway.

OTOH
have you been running anti-virus & anti-spyware, have you kept them uptodate?

[TangoR34]

actually my PC never had a proper antivirus before and someone gave me a proper sophos but it sucks! I'm using a trial kaspersky now and it had just digged out 110 virus in 2 kinds, one is the trojan! May be thts why. hope i can still over boost it like before.

[s_kinton]

actually my PC never had a proper antivirus before and someone gave me a proper sophos but it sucks! I'm using a trial kaspersky now and it had just digged out 110 virus in 2 kinds, one is the trojan! May be thts why. hope i can still over boost it like before.

Oh dear. Anti-virus is essential!!! That will be definately be the reason for the slow down. Try getting the full version of something like Avast, its free.

The first thing I would do is format your hard drive and reinstall windows. It really isn't worth trying to rescue that install. It'll be more hassle than its worth, trying to find and eradicate all those.

[vaughan]

i would erase the partition before formatting, some virii can lurk in the bootsector. and if you didn't have anti-virus then you never know what you might have been infected with.

try also from dos prompt fdisk c: /mbr

[speardane]

paranoid wrt viruses - but

erasing / reformatting from an infected machine may not work. These unhelpful....... people have thought of that. (or for that matter running virus checkers!)

if you have that many - I'd probably guess you have more. Try a an alternative and see how many others are found.

to be sure

• either boot from a CD (either a rescue disk or a Linux live disk - I'll explain more if you want) erase from that
• or take the disk out and piggyback on a known clean machine (as an extra IDE drive or an external).
• Or throw them away and treat yourself to a new (bigger) one.

and then re-install

been there, done that, have the t-shirts for taking "shortcuts"

rgds
John