Running slow...again

[huskerfan1200]

Been down this road before with this computer and have always had great help from you folks.

Computer and its applications (especially MS Outlook 2003) are running slow, especially time to boot-up and log in/out of the two use accounts we have in XP.

The four logs are posted and I have gone through the initial steps as instructed.

ESET scan showed 2 detections.

Have also been getting a "memory full" warning on the C: drive and will start transferring some files to the external drive soon. I didn't think we were even close as I had done this a while ago and moved all of our very large video/picture files.

Any help is appreciated...thanks (again)!

[cauzomb]

Free up some hard drive space and set a fixed pagefile size.. Not sure about the hijack this log..

[jholland1964]

How large is the hard drive and how much space is remaining?

Are you certain this is SPACE taken? Usually if the hard drive is nearing capacity you will not receive a Memory Full warning but a not enough space remaining warning or alert.

How much RAM is installed on this computer?

The ESET log you posted shows nothing. Where did you see 2 detections?

[huskerfan1200]

How large is the hard drive and how much space is remaining?

Are you certain this is SPACE taken? Usually if the hard drive is nearing capacity you will not receive a Memory Full warning but a not enough space remaining warning or alert.

How much RAM is installed on this computer?

The ESET log you posted shows nothing. Where did you see 2 detections?

C: is 74.5 GB
Ram is 512 MB

Before I transferred files to my external, there was less than 1 GB available. Now that I have done that, the warning message no longer appears so I can't copy exactly what it was saying. From what I remember, it was an alert bubble that appeared from the taskbar indicating that the hard drive was nearing its capacity...however, I am not sure of the exact verbage.

After moving files, the drive is now at 50.5 GB used and 24 GB free.

IIRC, the 2 detections appeared after the ESET scan completed. I reread the instructions in the other post to be sure that I should not delete these until instructed. I'll run it again tonight to see if they reappear.

I have also deleted almost 13,000 emails (sent, deleted, etc) from MS Outlook on wife's account on this computer. I would think that this would bog that program down just a bit.

[jholland1964]

C: is 74.5 GB
Ram is 512 MB
After moving files, the drive is now at 50.5 GB used and 24 GB free.

IIRC, the 2 detections appeared after the ESET scan completed. I reread the instructions in the other post to be sure that I should not delete these until instructed. I'll run it again tonight to see if they reappear.

I have also deleted almost 13,000 emails (sent, deleted, etc) from MS Outlook on wife's account on this computer. I would think that this would bog that program down just a bit.

The wording now of the alert about the hard drive nearing capacity isn't needed. You told me what I needed to know on that.

Honestly you are lucky you didn't lose all of these items you had "stored" on that hard drive. I am frankly surprised anything worked on there. 13,000 emails!!!! Personal emails? Sounds as if she has never, ever deleted any email since you began going online with the computer and receiving emails using Outlook. I am frankly surprised that Outlook worked at all. Though even with that number, unless they contained large attachments I doubt that just saved emails would slow a computer that much or lead to a hard drive reaching capacity warning. It may contribute somewhat, but that would not be the cause in most cases.

You always run the risk if important items are "stored" on the hard drive being lost because of outside influences also, a sudden power surge, a hard drive failure, a motherboard failure, etc., can render a computer useless and you can lose everything you have stored on there. This is why the recommendation is ALWAYS given, don't store something you cannot afford to lose on your computer. Always back it up someplace else, burn it to a cd, put it on an external hard drive...something but don't keep everything you own on the computer.

As far as the ESET log, it showed NO infections to even remove as noted by this line in the log

# found=0

If infections HAD been found the the ESET Scan, even if they were not removed, they would have been noted by name along with their location on the computer. In addition, the ESET Online Scanner doesn't have an "active" guard ability, meaning once it was done it was done...no longer active and it never gives alerts like an onboard anti-virus program. So I have to assume the detections were done by your Avira program. When the alerts popped up what did you tell it to do? If you told it to ignore then it possibly wouldn't alert you to them again because you told the program to ignore them.

Of course run the ESET scan again to be certain but if nothing shows in the log then there is nothing there.

Even with what you have moved from the hard drive, you still have over 2/3 of the hard drive taken. There has to be more on there that isn't needed or should be moved. I say this because you are not even completely current with your Windows Updates.

[huskerfan1200]

You're probably right about the Avira thing. I'll run a scan tonight and take a look in the morning.

My wife and I are/were online teachers for the past 6 years. Email is the way we did everything. I am up over 3000 for just this semester! I try to manage the attachments, but likely didn't do well enough.

On this machine using XP, we have two accounts. I just did a quick look at each to determine amount of space used in each account. After transferring, my side is down to 12.4 GB, her side is at 6 GB and a shared docs folder is at 1 GB. I then looked at the installed programs under 'add/remove programs' (which takes a really long time to open, btw) and the largest here is 400 MB goes down from there. There are some that we could get rid of, but nothing of substantial size. So, I can't really tell where all that used hard drive space is going.

Thanks for the assistance so far.

[jholland1964]

Ah...teachers. I have a daughter who is a teacher, but in a classroom and she too does a lot with email so I can imagine being online teachers how much space this would take. I would recommend that you try to keep items like this on an external drive if possible, because your school items most definitely SHOULDN'T be lost.

Honestly, if possible I would recommend using a webmail for email if you can. Though if that is not possible if you are required to use an email address set up by your school, one thing you can do is use GMAIL accounts for email storage. Gmail allows a LOT of space for storage of email, around 7GB I believe.
The way to do this is open the GMAIL accounts, receive the mail in the regular accounts via Outlook but then forward the mail to the GMAIL account for online storage and delete it from Outlook. This way you could access it anytime you need to do so but it would help keep the mail OFF the computer for the school year but still safely stored and easily accessible.
If you need to correspond with a student concerning a specific mail or lesson just send that mail back to yourself at your "regular" school address that you use with Outlook. Send the student mail using Outlook and it would go to them via your "regular" mail address.

You might also consider an online storage site, https://www.dropbox.com/ as a place to store documents for free. Believe the site offers free 2GB of storage so you can have files and documents available on the site which you could access from any of your computers, from anywhere, when you save the document or file in a folder for dropbox. This one gets very good reviews. So you might check that out also.

If each of you opens a GMAIL account and a dropbox account that would give you each 9GB of online storage or roughly 18GB of space not being used on your computer. Both GMAIL and dropbox accounts are accessable from any computer, anywhere, as long as you have your login names and passwords.

I didn't really see anything in Add/Remove that looked out of the ordinary or extremely large. So I don't believe that is a problem either.

The slowness you are still noticing could also have to do with the need to defrag the computer, have you done this lately?

[huskerfan1200]

Good info on the Gmail/dropbox options. I'll definitely check into those. She moved back to the classroom this year and is no longer teaching online. I just now realized the amount of stuff she still had on this computer and have eliminated most of it. My online teaching future is up in the air for the coming year. I'll certainly keep these options in mind and make better use of them.

I do a full defrag regularly. Last time was about a month ago and even then, after analyzation, it said that defrag was not necessary, but I did it anyway. Didn't clean up very much. Now that I have moved stuff to the external, I'll do it again. I also use "Defraggler" to do quick defrag work.

Ran the ESET scan again last night and 2 items were returned. The new ESET log is attached. Looks like a couple of things I could get rid of.

One question I should ask...

Each of the scans that I do on this machine are from my XP account. Would it be necessary to run the same scans on her side as well or does the scan look at everything in both accounts?

[jholland1964]

Tell you what, those findings could be false positives because there are legitimate files in the WebEx program with these names and also note that the log says

probably a variant of Win32/Genetik trojan

, not absolutely, so before you remove those two files found by ESET go to;

http://virusscan.jotti.org/en

Upload each file using the full path of each
C:\WINDOWS\Downloaded Program Files\WebEx\425\atpdmod.dll
C:\WINDOWS\Downloaded Program Files\WebEx\425\webexmgr.dll

Each individual file will then be scanned using 20 different scanners to see if the files are infected. See what each of those scanner reports says. Those scans will take only a few moments each. You can also scan each of those individually using MBA-M.

It looks to me by the logs that all files on "C" drive are being scanned so I don't believe you need to do each account individually.

[huskerfan1200]

Well...this is weird...and I'm not sure what to make of it.

I went to the virusscan site, clicked 'Browse' and navigated to C:...WINDOWS...Downloaded Program Files, and here is where it got weird.

First, the folder icon for "Downloaded Program Files" is different than all the others. Rather than the traditional folder, this one is tipped up on its side and more transparent/blurry.

Next, when I double-clicked "Downloaded Program Files" it popped only that much of the path into the seach field. I reloaded/retried and it did it again.

After a couple times of this, I did get the "Downloaded Program Files" to open, but the folder was empty. I tried to 'submit file' on the site but it said that the folder was empty.

Then I decided to navigate to the file to confirm that it was actually there. I went through "My Computer..." got to "WINDOWS" (I believe) and had to unhide the files. When I finally got to the "Downloaded Program Files" folder to open, it had only some files present but none for WebEx.

Then I tried to do a search (Start -> Search) and used the "atpdmod.dll" as the search string, but found nothing.

More than likely I am not doing something correctly, but I'll defer to your advice from here.