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I think my laptop has a virus, but how can i find out?

leandrohailey
Ive done a scan with norton, it picked up nothing. But i think my laptop has a virus. Its being very slow! Can the memory on it make the internet go slow? I have quite a lot of music, and lots of programmes on it like msn, blackberry desktop manager, paint shop pro, itunes, divx, opera, internet and firefox. Thats just a few big programmes... could they slow it down?
:21841


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    HI,

    A slow laptop could be caused by many things; first thing I would try is install: Process Explorer: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653 and sort by CPU, it's like an advanced task manger but very useful to see what processes are doing.  Is there one or two processes taking all the CPU resource?  If so what are they?


    "View" - "System Information" is also very good to get an overview of resource usage.  Pay close attention to packed images (dark purple) as these should be inspected. Sort by company name, not 100% reliable but can be useful.

    I would also suggest running: Autoruns: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902  to see what is being started on the machine, you might find it possible to disable a number of applications from running at startup which will save memory and CPU cycles if they are not required.

    Other than that, if the disk is highly active, you may want to have a tidy-up, purge browser caches, run disk cleanup, maybe follow that by a disk de-frag.  It will all help.

    With regards to a virus, I assume Norton is up to date?  You could always download just the Sophos command line scanner SAV32CLI: http://www.sophos.com/support/eula-sav32CLI.html as per:http://www.sophos.com/support/knowledgebase/article/13251.html . This will enable you to scan the machine(s) for viruses.  Does this find anything?

    Regards,
    Jak

    :21853
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  • 0

    HI,

    A slow laptop could be caused by many things; first thing I would try is install: Process Explorer: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653 and sort by CPU, it's like an advanced task manger but very useful to see what processes are doing.  Is there one or two processes taking all the CPU resource?  If so what are they?


    "View" - "System Information" is also very good to get an overview of resource usage.  Pay close attention to packed images (dark purple) as these should be inspected. Sort by company name, not 100% reliable but can be useful.

    I would also suggest running: Autoruns: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902  to see what is being started on the machine, you might find it possible to disable a number of applications from running at startup which will save memory and CPU cycles if they are not required.

    Other than that, if the disk is highly active, you may want to have a tidy-up, purge browser caches, run disk cleanup, maybe follow that by a disk de-frag.  It will all help.

    With regards to a virus, I assume Norton is up to date?  You could always download just the Sophos command line scanner SAV32CLI: http://www.sophos.com/support/eula-sav32CLI.html as per:http://www.sophos.com/support/knowledgebase/article/13251.html . This will enable you to scan the machine(s) for viruses.  Does this find anything?

    Regards,
    Jak

    :21853
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