Muscatine

Ya Nigel, been there, done that!  My "Pest Patrol" told me that previously I had a Trojan Horse, but, it deleted that.  I had a 13 year old grand daughter living with us, (my space, my face), suspect that to be part of the problem.  My Guru IS a Guru, can't let on where he works, but, he knows his sheet!  He does me a LOT of favors, and, I think that it's time to clean her up again!  It's loading REALLY slow, pop up blockers that were off, are now on again.  Just ALL kinds of things happening with it.  My AVG Anti-Virus tells me that there's NOTHING wrong.  I delete the "temporary" Internet files, on a regular basis, but, will try it again.  Won't hurt anything.  I thought that it was my crap, and not an Internet problem, know I know that it is!  Thankx folks.  Tom.

Tom,

We use both myspace and facebook here too, but it doesn't really have an impact on the speed of our computer.

The one thing that slowed my computer way down was all the programs running in the background.  On the bottom right side of your screen, in the blue bar on the bottom, there are icons.  They represent all the programs that run automatically when your computer starts up.  Some of those programs you don't need to automatically run, and you can change it so they only run if you want them  and open them.  Never shut off your anti-virus, but here's how you can check:

Click on start at the bottom, then "run".  when the bar comes up, type in msconfig

& hit enter.

Then when the tabs open, click on startup.  This will show you what is running automatically at startup.  You can customize it so only the programs you need and want start.  The more programs you have running at one time, the slower your computer.   A lot of these are necessary programs, so you don't want to just go crazy unclicking things, but on mine there were at least 10 or so that don't need to run all the time.

Finally, check for spyware...most of it is harmless, but some of it can really make your computer crawl.

Good luck

And finally, if things are just totally screwed, I have gone and restored the whole system.  What this does is takes your pc back to exactly how it was when you brought it home.  You will lose any programs, pictures, files installed, so you need to back them up first.  Once restored, you need to check for updates and do those.

I've had my laptop for years, and I've done this twice.  It ran like a brand new computer after that.

:)