(early) spring cleaning

Okay, I am trying once again to clean up a computer for a friend who is experiencing frustrating slowdown. The biggest performance problem has been running videos, which have been putting out less and less fps and now get choppy without anything else running on a fresh restart. I previously installed ad-aware se, avast! pro and spyware blaster on her machine, and have run through all their cleaning utilities. The drives are all defragged and diskscan error free. My next step is to try to sort out the jumble of installed software and eliminate all but the bare necessities, and in line with this, I need to figure out exactly what should be starting up with the computer, and what has just nudged its way into the hudge list of processes that come with every restart. if anyone can advise me how to proceed i would appreciate it. Also any software recommendations that could fill in some security gaps or help clean up would be helpful. Thanks for any help.

 

try Spybot

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download2471.html

and Regseeker

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download2579.html

 

In addition to the two above use crapcleaner - available this site which whooshes away large amounts of unnecessary crap files which build up on a computer. As to what shoud be in startup I only have Systray, Avast, and because I have an awful memory , a small diary program. After bootup diary gets closed down. I would say that the combination of crapcleaner and limiting startups shold solve the problem. Other programs you can activate as and when req'd. But never go on net without Avast and a firewall!
Hope this helps
Robert