Does anyone know much about PC's - HELP !

[cardiff_gareth]

My home PC is running really slow, last night it was so bad I couldn't get onto the internet - kept saying not responding and then CTRL+ALT+DEL was doing nothing just giving me the hour glass and noting else. In the end it went to a blank screen and I had to turn off at mians and restart. It did this all night. Even when pressing the windows button or trying to access control panel etc was very very slow. Only has 15gb of hard drive used so tried removing things off PC to see if it helped which also crashed it :!:
It did have 128mb of memory but I increased that to 384mb.

Any idea's on how to make the thing work before I accently lump hammer it into bits  

[Snooky]

How old is it? what is it trying to run? XP home, win 2000, or win98  :lol:

does it have all the latest MS patches installed? if not loking like a spyware or virus issue.

Want a new one let me know can get nice Compaq/HP machines at very good prices  

[karlo]

I use the windows scanner every now and then usually find it good at sorting problems.

http://onecare.live.com/site/en-gb/default.htm

[Mickle]

might not necessarily be spyware although it's a good bet, do you know if one of your processes is running at 100%?  If so which one? i'd be guessing one of the svchost.exe's.  bro had simular problem the other week

[cardiff_gareth]

might not necessarily be spyware although it's a good bet, do you know if one of your processes is running at 100%?  If so which one? i'd be guessing one of the svchost.exe's.  bro had simular problem the other week

cheers for the advice, its XP service disk 2 with macafee security centre as my virus protector. It also has windows defender installed.
The above svchost looks familier when I checked it last night - what is it :?:

Snoopy - might take you up on that !!

[Buddha]

might not necessarily be spyware although it's a good bet, do you know if one of your processes is running at 100%? If so which one? i'd be guessing one of the svchost.exe's. bro had simular problem the other week

I would definitely have a look for this, especially if the machine is configured to look for windows updates automatically.
There are some virus/trojans that call themselves svchost.exe so it could be malware of some sort, but if your machine is running up to date anti-virus & decent anti-spyware software then it might be worth looking at the svchost/windows update issue first.

This links to a Microsoft Knowledgebase article on this issue.