[sleepkyng]

what the hell is wrong with my computer?

today i booted it up and now it lags like nobody's business. Trying to run winamp/firefox/wireless card/utorrent and everything is fine for like 20 seconds, and then a severe moment of lag where the music stops, the pointer won't work right and nothing can be typed!

what the heck is going on???

 

[skudmunky]

Download and run Adaware, Spybot: Search and Destroy. Do you have any firewalls or anti virus? Zone Alarm is a good software firewall, and AVG anti virus works very well.

Also, try defragmenting your hard drive, and find out what processes are running and what is taking up lots of cpu time / ram.

 

[catachresis]

Sounds to me like you picked-up some malware.

Skudmunky's advice is sound: run adaware and spybot s&d. If anything serious pops up, chances are there's an install trojan secreted somewhere in your temp files. You'll have to reboot into safe mode and run the trojan finder and antivirus programmes. Make sure you update them before you reboot.

 

[Stephonovich]

Download and run HijackThis!, then post the log it generates. Feel free to run Ad-Aware/Spybot/What-Have-You beforehand, it can't hurt.

 

[sleepkyng]

the thing is, I'm always running avast, and I just ran spybot with no problems.

Ran trojan scanner, ran ad-aware - nada.

I have a sneaking suspicion that Utorrent is giving me grief, but i have no idea why.

thanks for the help, i'll use hijackthis and see what's the dilly.