WTF, My Windows 7 machine has slowed down significantly

I have had Windows 7 installed on my laptop since early September (I had early access to a final build copy through IEEE). Everything was fine to start, but about a month ago it has just slowed to a halt.

Boot up time is longer and the initial startup after logging in is painfully slow. When I start Firefox as my first program, it literally takes 30 - 60 seconds just to open up. The entire system is often times unresponsive and slow. Just this morning I continually clicked on the eject icon on the taskbar, so that I could safely remove my USB stick and it never even responded or opened. I gave up in frustration.

I don't know if this is just Windows bloat or if there's some background process that is causing this. I even ran msconfig.msc to remove a lot of unnecessary startup processes and it still hasn't helped. There's no excuse for programs to take a full minute just to pop up the first window upon execution. Clearly something is wrong. I'm tempted to reinstall the Windows 7 again, but then I'm just setting myself up for the same problems a month or so after I reinstall it.

Is anyone else experiencing this? Any suggestions? I had better performance from Vista.

Yeah, I do have a resident virus scanner, but i should run a full scan just to check. I also will run ccleaner to eliminate the registry or other bloat being the cause. I'll report back. Thanks.

Yeah, first thing I think of with those symptoms is a virus. Not that yopur issue is always a result of viruses. Try running 2 or 3 virus checkers. some run from the web.

logicearth said:

dave1812 said:

Yeah, first thing I think of with those symptoms is a virus.

Thats funny...I always think of an antivirus with those symptoms. Sometimes the cure is worse then the disease...

I don't have speed issues using either AVAST or NIS or NAV. Start/shutdown times are longer, but overall usage, my PC's are peppy.

Post a screenshot of your msconfig startup tab, installed programs, and begin updating your drivers - use the guide in my sig.

Run Avast boot scan. Then Spybot in Safe Mode. Then you can check off infections.

CCleaner DIsk and Registry clean as mentioned, then the free Auslogics defraggers are state of the art. The p.c. is then unquestionably cleaned and ordered.

Run msconfig and uncheck everything in startup tab except your AV and gadgets/stikynotes if you use em. Anything else is a freeloader on CPU/RAM and can start when you click it.

Can you System Restore before the problem started?