Time for a new free virus scanner - advice?

[Buster's Uncle]

If you haven't already, check what processes are running at startup with msconfig.exe (start > run) or by downloading ccleaner and going to the startup tab.

About to do this now...

[Buster's Uncle]

Okay - I've turned a bunch of stuff off, and am about to hit the Restart prompt - if I don't come back it's Draz' fault...

[Buster's Uncle]

Whoah.  Draz messed me up real bad - had to log in on my mother's machine to come find out what he had me use, to turn some stuff back on...

[Buster's Uncle]

THAT'S an hour and a half of my life I'll never get back.  Turns out the wireless receiver software was in the boot stuff, best to not turn THAT off - and the password to our wifi I had handy, someone not-me had written "I" for "1".  Had a miserable time getting everything straightened out - upside is, I finally got into the booster I'd never been able to join, so I'm not making do with "poor" signal anymore.

[Buster's Uncle]

...Of course my machine is stinking performance right now, but it's only been on 20 minutes, so time to go spoil some cats while it wakes up more.

-I swear, it's weird to see ALL THOSE BARS on my connection...

[Buster's Uncle]

I think I better get back on the horse what threw me, with an hour to mess around before bedtime.  Let's go see if Draz' next suggestion also sabotages me...

[Buster's Uncle]

reinstalling windows is often the easiest reliable way to get a windows machine back to a good level of performance.

...The install disk is lost among Mylochka's computer room crap even before the move back from Texas.  It's come up before, and 'fraid it's not going to happen...

-My office is a pig sty, and I have the rudimentary skils to have installed a couple of drives before - I can definitely get the case open, and the works definitely can use cleaning, but I want to run though the feasible software stuff first - one thing at a time, and the cleaning is going to make me a little sick, so not tonight...

[Buster's Uncle]

Download CPU-Z and confirm you only have one core working.

Look in your BIOS for "Advanced Clock Calibration" and turn it on.

Check again in CPU-Z.

The processor can also be overclocked quite a lot (up to 3.4-3.7 GHz, supposedly). You might not be able to get that high on the stock cooler, though.

One core.

-Okay, somebody tell me where my BIOS is and how to turn on the "Advanced Clock Calibration".  I'm curious about the overclocking, too, though not inclined to risk being very bold...

[Buster's Uncle]

ANYone?

Performance is good this morning - it may not have responded the same to restarts yesterday evening, when it was a little stall-y.

[Spacy]

The one time I tried it was using a AMD Overdrive utility.  Just had to download the utility and run it like any other program. 

Failed miserably in my case.

Here is a PDF I found after a quick google search.  Use with caution.  https://www.amd.com/Documents/AMD_Dragon_AM3_AM2_Performance_Tuning_Guide.pdf

I ended up having to throw out that computer. 

[Buster's Uncle]

I'll have a look later.  Thanks.  -For the warning, too.

[Buster's Uncle]

Performance comes and goes -nothing as crap as I'd gotten sadly used to, but still getting tabs lock up and jam other tabs until the problem clears up, which should almost never happen, not several times a day and that an improvement.

I think I better email Draz' attention before I try the technique that backfired on GodKing...

[Buster's Uncle]

Oooh, that .pdf isn't in Martian or anything, but skimming it has intimidated me enough that I'm definitely waiting for more input - and I wanted to activate that core days ago, that sounding like just the ticket for not having all pages load slow enough to see...

---

Odd thing.  It's Thursday, I changed the setting for the auto-defrag to about suppertime yesterday -it had been set to 3 in the morning, and I don't know when the machine's been on then- but I just now realized I don't know about it happening.  I better check that for last time defraged...

[Buster's Uncle]

Nope.  It last ran on the 3rd, Sunday.  WTF?

---

Hey - has anyone else noticed how awful Hotmail is since they changed around everything about a year and a half ago and coerced a second email which incidentally started getting a hellacious amount of spam?  I mean, I hate all the interface changes more than the next guy, but I'm talking about performance - takes forever to load, freezes constantly, jams up other open tabs while it's constantly crapping itself?

[Buster's Uncle]

-That took five minutes to post.  In an incredible coincidence, I still had Hotmail open from pinging Draz when I posted.  This one will go right up, mark my words.