It's had AVG (free) antivirus running on for the past 8 months or so but it's been getting slower and slower as windows does. However, I tried Panda antivirus' online scan and it found a worrying amount of problems (2 viruses and about 400 spyware items) so I've ditched AVG and now run Panda's 30 day trial which I'll probably end up buying at the end of trial. I also run Ad-aware on it and scan it regularly.
Basically... according to the Panda and Ad-aware, the PC is clean. The resources information doesn't reveal anything is using loads of memory or CPU but the PC is seriosuly getting slower and slower to the point that it's almost becoming impossible for her to run Photoshop on it. It was never like this as a fresh install.
I've defragged the drive (7,200 rpm NTFS), inccreased the pagefile size to 750MB.
I'm running out of ideas and I really don't believe the only way to solve this is to do a fresh install. What else can I try? I know there are registry cleaner apps but there are loada and I'm not sure which are better than others? And in all seriousness, is cleaning the registry going to give it a 100% speed boost?
I'm curious how the system can be so slow when it appears to have most of its resources free. Very weird.
The hard disk is partitioned so that 10GB is given to the OS, with 3GB currently free and 70GB used as storage drive (with over 30GB still free). Both partitions use NTFS.
I'd love any advice on things to try without a re-install
EDIt | I've also checked the obvious places in the registry "LOCAL/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Run" "CurrentUser/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVerson/Run" and the startup folder.