PC Help

[Dan Gould]

Some weird things happening on the PC lately, I am hoping that the fine and knowledgeable people here can shed light.

About a week ago, out of the blue, I got a message when I turned it on - Windows had a problem loading - it gave me an option of running in Safe Mode or a couple of other things or just running Windows. I let it run Windows, it ran, but extremely super slow. My wife thought it was a virus or malware of some sort. She downloaded Spy Bot, we ran Norton as well. Bottom line, after a re-start, things were normal again.

Now, this morning, no warning about Windows problem, but super slow start up. Took absolutely forever in fact. I ended up running Spy Bot again, this time it only found a tracking cookie, nowhere near as much spyware etc as the first time, but now that I've shut down and restarted, everything is back to normal.

I looked at the Task Manager when things were so slow, and it showed a CPU usage of 100% with something called TeaTimer.exe being the worst culprit. So aside from general advice on my problem, I am wondering if anyone knows what this program is and whether it is the source of my problem and what is best to remove it if it is.

Thanks in advance!

[Chalupa]

TeaTimer.exe is not spyware. It is part of Spybot AND a major resource hog.

[Dan Gould]

So it sounds like Spy Bot didn't help matters, it was actually hurting things. It also sounds like I have an unstable operating system, if that makes sense - it hasn't been crashing but its sometimes has no resources to operate properly, and it may not boot up right every time.

Thanks J.H.

[Jim Alfredson]

If you don't have anti-virus, try AVG. That combined with a malware remover should be fine.

[Chalupa]

What Jim said. I use AVG

I used to use Spybot but got rid of it, in part, because of TeaTimer. I think a good firewall coupled with a anti-virus program wlll achieve the same results w/ less of a drain on your computer. Also, If you think your PC is still running sluggish I would scan it w/ Malwarebytes. Once you've made sure you don't have any malware on your computer I would then download and run CC Cleaner(A.K.A. Crap Cleaner) but not the registry cleaner. DO NOT run the registry cleaner unless you know what your doing. Also, the company that makes CC Cleanerhas a awesome defrag program called Defraggler. Run that and you should see a better performance. All 3 programs are free.

http://www.malwarebytes.org/

http://www.ccleaner.com/

http://www.defraggler.com/

[BERIGAN]

Dan, XP I assume??? How old is your computer????

[JSngry]

I use Spybot, I just shut off TeaTimer. Don't knoiw if that hurts the "immunization" protection or not, but the TeaTimer thing was buggin' too much for my liking.

Spybot still scans just fine though.

[Dan Gould]

Yes, Conrad, XP. I think its about 4 years old now though it might be a little shorter than that.

Thanks again for the advice, J.H. I will definitely check into those downloads.

[Kevin Bresnahan]

When was the last time you ran disc clean up and defragmented your hardrive? Both of those things should be done every now & then.

Easiest way:

Put the cursor over the start button and press the right button - select "Explore" and click the left mouse button.

In Windows Explorer, find your C: drive. Right mouse click that and click "Properties".

Click the button labeled "Disk Cleanup". If you haven't done this or not done it in a while, it will take a long time.

After cleanup, click the "Tools" tab in the properties window. You'll see a "Defragment now" button. This will also take a long time, no matter if you've done it recently or not.

BTW, a good free program to clean up your PC is CCleaner. The best thing about it is the registry cleaner. It will clean out any unused registry keys.

If you still have problems, the next step involves editing the registry to stop all the crap that's loading at start up. Try these easy things first.

Kevin

[Dan Gould]

Almost certain my wife de-fragged the hard drive the first time this happened, but I'll check with her to be sure.