Laptop running very slowly today

Hello. I woke up today and I noticed that my laptop is running MUCH slower than yesterday. So much slower, that it takes minutes for anything to load. I have spent the greater part of the day trying to figure out what could be wrong with it.

I cleared all of the temp files, browsing history and anything else possible. I ran disk defrag and deleted some programs i don't use very often. I received the virtual memory error message a few times now. I am really quite stumped at what the problem is.

It is a new laptop, not even more than 2 months old.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

 

I am running a virus scan as we speak.

I recently installed Limewire. Aside from that, I don't believe I have done anything outside of normal use.

 

If the scan comes clean. Check the IDE controllers properties in device manager. They should be in DMA mode. Using Limewire can be considered outside of normal use

DLS my friend just my 2 cents, outta here :-D

 

I got rid of limewire completely earlier, because I had a suspicion that it was the cause of this.

The scan is taking a very long time compared to normal.

 

It looks like I have the svchost.exe virus. When I go to the current processes tab, I see about 8 different svchost's running at the same time.

I am unsure though, as the virus scan looks as if it is going to take 8 hours to complete.

I found a guide to getting rid of the svchost vrus here:

http://www.ehow.com/how_5132341_remove-svchostexe-virus.html

Should I let the scan finish, or should I go ahead and remove it manually?

 

Scratch that, I looked into it further, and it seems that only the natural windows process svchost.exe is running, not the virus, SVCHOST.exe. So i don't think thats the cause.

I will wait for the scan to finish.

 

How do you reformat it exactly?

It is a netbook, so it does not have a CD drive.

 

Just finished the AVG virus scan in safe mode, I am not sure if it found anything, as I did not get any messages after.

I am running a spybot s&d scan now, in safe mode.

I am noticing it is still pretty slow while running in safe mode.

 

I just read the report the AVG scan left, and it did not find any infections. That has to be wrong.

 

I have an Acer AspireOne with 512MB of RAM.

I uninstalled AVG 9.0 and installed Antivir. It is running much better now, just about as good as new.

I ran several scans with the updated antivir, and nothing has come up. So I believe that AVG 9.0 was just taking up a very large portion of my RAM.