Help needed

Hi there

Please bear with me, this is the first time I have ever posted to a forum, so not entirely sure of the rules!

I have been having laptop performance issues for a while and am finally pulling my finger out and trying to turn it back into a usable machine. I’ve made some progress running Ccleaner, but both Explorer.exe and Firefox freeze on a regular basis. I suspect that the issue lies mainly with a slow CPU and insufficient RAM (which sits at c 80% with only Firefox open), but before I install more memory I want to check there is nothing more sinister going on. I’ve done a full scan with Avast Free today, no issues found. I have also stripped down the number of programs running on startup and turned off the fancy graphics in Vista.

System details:

Toshiba Satellite L300-1BW (3.5 years old)
Vista 32x Home Premium Edition
1GB RAM
Intel Celeron T1600 1.66Ghz
Avast Free Edition (most recent)
Zonealarm Free firewall

I have run AdwCleaner from the instruction post at the top of this section and attached log. I’m going to progress down the list now and post further logs after this entry.

Many thanks in advance for your help.

Helen

Trying a lighter firewall might be of some benifit but I think your main issue would definitely lie with the minimal 1GB of ram installed, vista is quite resource hungry so i would be sticking at least 3-4 GB in the system.

32 bit systems can only use 3 GB but if there is 4 installed it will access it when needed.

Craig, thanks for the speedy response, I’ll keep working my way down the diagnostic tools just in case. MBAM found nothing - log attached.

Cheers

Helen

btw, any firewall (free) recs? I’ve heard Online Armor is good

OTL log attached

and finally, aswMBR log. I have no idea what any of this means or if it has found an infection, so please let me know if I should also run RogueKiller.

Many thanks

Helen

Im not qualified to examine your logs for malware but i can give you some advice as to lighten your processes, Privatefirewall is probably the lightest firewall you could use but Outpost free suite with everything removed bar the firewall installed via a custom install is alot more intuitive, Online Armor is also quite good.

If you dont use toolbars then you could also uninstall the Google toolbar, if you dont connect to your Iphone/Ipod wirelessly you can uninstall the Bonjour service, Trusteer has had it’s issues with avast in the past so that imo would be uninstalled also.

If you have CCleaner installed you can navigate to tools/startups and set some of the Toshiba processes to “no” as you’ll probably find that none of them are required, the only thing you might have to do is run a manual search for your toshiba updates through the installed program in start menu rather than having it run all the time but for certain the DVD process can be unticked as it will start when you click on it anyway, the Apple APSDaemon.exe can also be set to no as it will start when you click on itunes.

Windows Defender i would advise you to disable as that would be consuming alot of resources and it isn’t needed with avast installed