Computer is still slow, tried everything

Have you updated your BIOS? That can sometimes increase/decrease performance, so if you haven't, update it, and if you have, try going back.

Also, you could try what I did yesterday and turn off your computer, unplug the power, and hold down the power button for 30 seconds. This will ensure that all capacitors are drained of electricity and your BIOS will be reset (a more thorough reset than going into the BIOS and resetting it to default settings).

The above suggestion is for hardware related issues. If it is a software issue, you will have to post some images of your startup programs by using print screen, pasting into Paint/Powerpoint (right click to save the image after cropping it using the format tab)/Microsoft office picture manager, and then scrolling down your startup programs to show the rest and following the print screen procedure each time.

Rather than print screen and cropping, you could just use the snipping tool built into Windows 7. Go into the start menu, search programs and files, and type in snipping tool.

Additionally, you may want to install Malwarebytes Malwarebytes : Free anti-malware, anti-virus and spyware removal download to see if your antivirus software is missing anything. What antivirus are you running?

Here's my startups (I also just added a screenshot of my running processes in the first post)

http://img337.imageshack.us/img337/2778/startuplr.jpg

For virus/spyware/firewall I use ZoneAlarm Extreme Security with DataLock. Updating BOIS now.

ZoneAlarm has been known to cause some issues with Windows 7 in the past. Have you tried uninstalling it and seeing if your computer runs faster? If there is no noticeable difference, you can always reinstall it.

Edit: Also, could you scroll down your startup programs and processes and snip them to show more of what you have running? Thanks.

I would definitely recommend downloading and installing the free version of Malwarebytes given in the link in my previous post. Run the full scan (it takes 2-3 hours to run on a 500 GB drive if it is not too full).

writhziden said:

ZoneAlarm has been known to cause some issues with Windows 7 in the past. Have you tried uninstalling it and seeing if your computer runs faster? If there is no noticeable difference, you can always reinstall it.

Edit: Also, could you scroll down your startup programs and processes and snip them to show more of what you have running? Thanks.

That's actually all of the startup options that are checked. The bottom one says "Bluetooth Software".

Didn't know that about ZA. I may try uninstalling that to see if it makes things faster.

writhziden said:

I would definitely recommend downloading and installing the free version of Malwarebytes given in the link in my previous post. Run the full scan (it takes 2-3 hours to run on a 500 GB drive if it is not too full).

Did install Malwarebytes, it did find an infection and took care of that which is good.

Could you post your Malwarebytes log? You will find it in C:\Users\(Your administrator user)\AppData\Roaming\Malwarebytes\Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware\Logs

Also, did the BIOS update help your problem, make it worse, or stay the same?

So I have a question about BIOS settings. I've heard all different answers on this one, but what SATA setting should I be using if I have a single drive? There's AHCI, IDE, and RAID. Probably not AHCI, but I've heard that the motherboard uses the RAID controller for all SATA drives, so even with a single drive it should be set to RAID. Is this a good idea?