New hard drive or reformat?

The hard drive and hardware are ok I didnt see any problems. As far as the habits they are the head of a county hunters society or w.e and theirs alot of files and such. His three sons also used it and everything I am not truly sure what made it incredibly slow. I do not think he would be smart enough to cover his tracks if he was using his computer for "innapropriate things". Although the computer is cluttered and not well organized there are also alot of what i feel are uneeded programs. In your oppinion you feel I should just reformat that computer and take out the partition? or should I get a bigger hdd say 500 gb?

To add to the advice list, I'd be trying a boot in Safe Mode first loading as little as possible. Also, try a chkdsk from a command prompt and/or use a live boot CD such as Hirens 12. This can do some disk and AV checking.

45minutes to boot
I'd say a clean install with or without a new disk is looking likely.

mjf thank you for the advice. I do not usually look at a computer and go "welp its screwd". but in this case i feel like it is its almsot physically impossible to do anything on. I just sit there and twittle my thumbs and watch the kids play gears of war while the thing loads.

supermasterpig said:

The hard drive and hardware are ok I didnt see any problems. As far as the habits they are the head of a county hunters society or w.e and theirs alot of files and such. His three sons also used it and everything I am not truly sure what made it incredibly slow. I do not think he would be smart enough to cover his tracks if he was using his computer for "innapropriate things". Although the computer is cluttered and not well organized there are also alot of what i feel are uneeded programs. In your oppinion you feel I should just reformat that computer and take out the partition? or should I get a bigger hdd say 500 gb?

You say he has an 80 gig "backup" partition that is full. What is on it?

If it isn't a factory restore partition of some kind, why is the HD split into 2 partitions?

I assume you can't mess with that backup partition and will have to leave it alone. If you know you don't need it, then combine it with the existing 170 C partition. But what would that solve other than generating more free space on C?

Offhand, I don't see why you need a 500 gig HD unless you have reason to believe the existing HD is defective.

I mean--he may eventually run out of space and need a larger HD--but how do you explain a PC that terribly slow with 5 GB of RAM and a C with 170 occupied and 25 free?

Something else is going on and a new hard drive won't solve it if the existing HD is OK.

Why 100 processes? What's using the RAM?

The backup partition cant be factory installed its an hp and comes with the recovery drive. And its just all full of back up. I dont know what program they used or what to even do with it. I am lost when it comes to back ups plus they have no clue what program they used to back it up. Theyve used several different programs. I just figured that the computer was running slower since it only had 25 gb left. I need to go back and look at the process's again I didnt study them to hard as it wasnt long before the computer become unresponsive and I could no longer view them.

If none of the users can explain what is on the backup partition or why it is even there, then what is the point of it?

If they need backups (whatever that means to them), what good are the "backups" if they are on the same drive as the "originals". If the drive fails, you lose both.

There might be some advantage to deleting the backups partition to make C larger, but I wouldn't expect miracles.

I assume all of their "original" data is on C?

I'd get to the bottom of the processes and RAM issue and continue to consider an infection or extremely poor maintenance.

As far as antivirus and malware goes have another idea for a program or are the ones im ussing alright. Ill have to see the computer tom and see if I can look at what process are going. I do know for a fact that only about 2 out of 5 gb of ram is being used by the process's so idk. As far as the back up thing goes its funny because the average american home users are told to always back up their data. but to where? what do I backup? How do I use it? and then you get the problem I am now dealing with. I also ran maintence on it what i could as far as that goes I could only use glary utilities now disk defrag would even begin to boot up.

supermasterpig said:

As far as antivirus and malware goes have another idea for a program or are the ones im ussing alright. Ill have to see the computer tom and see if I can look at what process are going. I do know for a fact that only about 2 out of 5 gb of ram is being used by the process's so idk. As far as the back up thing goes its funny because the average american home users are told to always back up their data. but to where? what do I backup? How do I use it? and then you get the problem I am now dealing with. I also ran maintence on it what i could as far as that goes I could only use glary utilities now disk defrag would even begin to boot up.

You can go here for a good online scanner:

Free ESET Online Antivirus Scanner

or here:

HouseCall - Free Online Virus Scan - Trend Micro USA

And run Superantispyware or Malware Bytes.

You could well be infected, but runaway processes like you have certainly doesn't mean you are. Try to turn these unneeded process off as mentioned above.

And run your virus scans from safe mode as well.

thanks I will try and get to bottom of this hopefully tom. I usually dont like to do this for people other than familiy and I never redo computers that people ask to load full backups on. if they want to keep file sona usb drive until its done fine but I dont know hwo to load a full compressed backup of their computer.