Having computer issues freezing/slow?

Question

Hello all. If someone can help me with this it would be fantastic.
All of a sudden today, My laptop, which is an Acer Aspire by the way.

I saved some pictures of my son off of my facebook onto my computer earlier today and just out of nowhere while watching a video it shut down with no warning. no restart or anything.
so I turned it back on and I turned on explorer, it's a blank page. it asks me if I want to restore my session and I do and it freezes the browser.

I x out of it and it wont close. the task manager wont open either.
i tried to transfer some pictures to a diffrent folder, first of all it took forever starting and then i canceled it and right now from 30 minutes ago is still cancelling.

I tried to open mcafee and it wont even open at all. I'm doing a defrag right now and its taking forever. so basically in short... Everything is freezing and refusing to open/start. Does anybody have a solution for this?

Answer 1

In my experience, a sudden slowdown like this could mean one of two things - severe overheating or a virus/malware infection. If you turn off your computer and leave it off for a couple of hours, and after turning it back on it still acts this slow from the start, then I'd rule out overheating and concentrate on scanning for and cleaning up viruses and malware. McAffee is not the best antivirus - it doesn't have perfect detection scores and is too heavy on system resources, in my opinion. I'd recommend getting the following software:

Avast Free - http://www.avast.com/en-us/free-antivirus-download

or

Auslogics Antivirus - http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/Antivirus/

The latter has a cool feature - if you manage to install it on your system and even if a virus prevents you from scanning your computer and proceeds to mess up your OS beyond being bootable, Auslogics lets you boot into Rescue Mode and clean up the infection without loading Windows (it has to be installed on your computer prior to the total crash).

Also, get Malwarebytes Free to check for malware - http://www.malwarebytes.org/products/malwarebytes_free

and

TDSSkiller for rootkits - http://support.kaspersky.com/faq/?qid=208283363

If unable to download or scan in normal mode, boot into "Safe mode with networking" by repeatedly pressing the F8 button when your computer starts to boot until you get to a menu where this will be an option. Run the scans and remove any threats found in safe mode, then repeat the scans in normal mode.

Hope this helps. Good luck!

Answer 2

The best way is to download Ccleaner here http://bitly.com/UrALrK



Or you can go on Windows operating system locate the command prompt and go there to do the following:

Create a Recovery file of system and date it today.



Then begin by;

delete the 'Temp' folders..they have hidden subfolders so you need to set the attributes in order to bypass this. For each subfolder delete all cookies and rubbish left behnd after install-uninstalled programs. Do a 'dir' command to check your progress. Make sure the 'Temp' file is empty.



goto c:\windows\prefetch and delete everything in there..no exceptions



goto c:\windows folder and delete all the '$' files that have been installed by updates. They can all be succesfully deleted and just take up disk space.



Locate the Internet Temporary Files..Check to see how high the saving level is..some have it set at 30 days..but that stores faaaar tooo much data..though it slows down the system overal. Keep this to a minimum..suggest 2 or 5 at most.



Delete all 'cookies' all those you don't need.



Locate the windows directory and go through the folders you know and those you don't need. Check this once a week at least. Some programs will install under XP as NT and older systems where there is no check of systems weight.



Check to see that system files have not changed since last booting. Things like .ini files or .bat are important items.





Check for 'Hidden Directories' all over the disk...do this at the command prompt:



dir *.* /ah wil show these hidden directories



Check the 'dir' command for all parameters

Answer 3

You actually just described 2 completely separate problems that have 2 separate causes.... so I guess I'll start with the shutting off on its own...



All laptops have a thermal circuit breaker that's about the size of a finger nail just under the processor, attached to the motherboard. Some also have a secondary breaker under the video card. They're designed to kill the power to the computer if it ever gets over it's tolerance temperature (to prevent the computer from melting). Computers are designed to be able to process data at 100%, process graphics at 100% and have some blockage of the fan without the temperature breaking the tolerance limit and tripping the circuit breaker, but if you have a pet or a dusty house, the heat sink can get so clogged with $hit that the fan just wont be able to keep it cool and it will die.



Usually a user will be doing something graphics intensive when they experience this for the first time (playing a game, watching porn, or watching a DVD are the 3 most common things people are typically doing during their first thermal trip).



So you were watching a movie of some kind... no surprise. Processing graphics is really intensive on the GPU (video card) so the secondary thermal breaker is probably what killed it. The way to fix it is to get a can of compressed air and blow it in towards the fan exit (where air normally blows out of) and blow the air back in towards the grill (push all the pet hair and dust off the grill and in to the fan assembly). Then blow the air up through the fan and out through the grill. Then back through the grill and back towards the fan, and keep switching back and forth till all the giant chunks of hair and crap stop blowing out of the machine.



That will solve problem #1. Problem number 2 is the fact that the machine is freezing. If it's just going really really really slow, then that's strictly a software problem. But if it's "frozen" meaning you can't do ANYTHING, then that means you have a bad hard drive. Essentially when your computer needs to run a process in order to move forward and calls a file from the hard drive and the hard drive doesn't respond with the file, the computer wont know what to do so it will just hang there indefinitely waiting for the file that it's just called. It doesn't know that the file will never come. So your second issue sounds like it's either a massive software corruption, OR the hard drive is failing. Hard drives are designed to last for 3000 hours before they fail, but sometimes, if they run hot a lot, it can accelerate their failure rate... which might have happened when you take the overheating in to consideration.



SO... here's what I'd do.



1) Get a can of compressed air. Clean that baby out.

2) Recover the computer back to factory condition. Press F8 at startup if you need to get in to the machine before hand using safe mode in order to save your docs and stuff to a pen drive. But then you'll need to recover the machine back to factory condition. To return it to the factory-state on Acers, you press ALT+F10 at startup until you enter the recovery console. Also, more and more computers are using F8 and then the "Repair My Computer" option for recoveries.



After you recover your computer, if it's still freezing and acting crazy (or if it doesn't even let you recover it), then it means the hard drive is failing and the recovery partition is on a section of the hard disk that's failed. You'll then have to order a new 2.5" SATA hard drive from amazon.com ( this is the kind you need: http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Scorpio-Cache-Notebook/dp/B0037NYQ6Q/ref=pd_rhf_gw_shvl2 ) and order a recovery DVD from Acer. The DVD's cost about 12 dollars, plus shipping. When you get your new hard drive and DVD, replace the hard drive (they go in on the bottom of the laptop) and then power up the computer with the DVD in the CD tray. Press "next, next, next, next, next, next) and wait forever as it loads the original factory image on to the machine....



And you're done. Sorry for the long post but this issue was complicated. =/



Good luck!

Answer 4

Hello,

A good registry cleaner I use is CCleaner. It's a reliable tool to get rid of worms, trojams, malwares and viruses that affect your pc performances. Free download here http://bit.ly/1sW1QRg

It works like a charm.

I hope it helps

Answer 5

With severe system slowdown and suddeny shutdown along with mcaffee not being able to be opened. I believe you ahve contracted a viruse. I would go to bleepingcomputers.com and follow the helpful guides they have. It might not be enough but give it a shot anyways.

Answer 6

my advice is to download CC Cleaner and just clean your computer like you would a trash can. Sometimes your computer needs to be cleaned out.