A couple interesting things about the PC I was asking about (working on it today):
My friend's main complaints were that "people told me they got emails with dirty photos in them that they say came from me so I must be infected with the conficker worm", and "I keep getting a windows error message" at various times, and "my PC runs too slow".
Putting 2+2 together and getting 5, I assumed her PC was like the other computer illiterate folks' PCs that I try to help with similar complaints (and end up finding tons of malware running, windoze not updated thus open to possible known exploits, firewall not even running, etc etc on their PCs) I figured her PC is probably infected with god knows what and in some terrible state....but after doing a lot of work on it today I see that...
- It is not infected by any malware that i can see, testing it with several different anti-virus, anti-rootkit, anti-spywares; instead it is a pleasant surprise security wise - if anything it is protected too strongly (for the amount of resources the machine actually has)!
- Her PC is slow as hell because it is running latest XP, has tons of startup processes (mostly just needless junk as far as i am concerned), is running "NORTON INTERNET SECURITY v15.something" (suite with anti-vir, anti-spy, firewall, +more), spybot teatimer, plus another security anti-vir type program called "THREATFIRE" in realtime, and worst of all - it has only 512MB RAM!!!!!!
IMO Norton by itself is bad enough resource wise but all that other stuff too, it is just dragging the PC down to disk swapping hell. Turns out from learning more that her PC last year was badly corrupted by a bunch of viruses and another friend of hers had to reformat/reinstall XP and he got her setup with Norton and other anti-malware apps like THREATFIRE.
On principle i think it is bad to be running more than one realtime antivirus in memory at a time, setting them up to fight over things and cause some kind of unexpected havoc, let alone the system resource drain that they both may be causing, but after researching it i think that THREATFIRE can coexist with norton (please correct me if i am wrong) but i am uninstalling THREATFIRE anyway, for now at least.
I've done a bunch of things to streamline her PC, update some apps like SPYBOT, following some Secunia component update recommendations, cleanup temp files/registry/etc with CCLEANER, and most important of all will be recommending that she upgrade the PC's ram. From just a quick check on the 'net the PC can take up to 4gb ram - and it is not very expensive either. Just going from 512mb to 1gb would make a world of difference. Checking with process explorer now, at startup with not even running any applications (other than those firing up on boot like Norton) it only has about 120mb of free ram. Just running Word gets her down to about 80mb, adding her web browser it goes down to like 40mb.....
What I don't think I will be able to help her with is her windows system error that she has been getting. She saved the message and it is some kind of "stop error" relating to either hardware or a driver. It appears that she installed some kind of hardware/software thing related to how she does dictation b4 she started getting this problem, which causes windoze to crash/dump. I think she needs to go back to that hardware/software vendor and discuss the problem with them as I haven't a clue as to what that is all about. I did unselect the "dumprep 0 -u" startup command in msconfig since I don't think it needs to keep running that (?) & disabled the error reporting function in XP for now.
If folks have run into anything similar & have suggestions please comment. THANKS!