My brother is having an issue with his machine (XP - Office 2002, plenty of RAM), it's slower than hell. I went over there and ran a few things, deleted temp files, etc. but it's still very slow. About a year ago I had to spend quite a bit of time removing a trojan vundo virus using Hijack This and his machine sped up again. He doesn't currently have that particular virus again but I can't find anything obvious that's awry.

Some reading I've done suggests the machine may be in need of a major registry clean up, so am probably going to try Registry Mechanic on it.

Was wondering if any of you good souls have any other recommendations for things I could look at that might be problem areas. He only uses the machine for email and the internet.

Thanks much!

reformating will cure it unless the hard drive is coughing up a lug and about to check out.

Aside from mallware it could be a program that's kicking it into low gear. I purchased a panasonic camcorder and while it works fine the software need for it on my computer is a hugh RAM hog and really slows it down everything if I need to run the program to import video. Makes me feel like I'm using a P2 again, I start it and then go do something until I see it's up and running.

If it's slow all the time, then its probable that something is running in the background and hogging recources. What process are shown running in task manager? Have you disabled just about everything under the startup tab after typing MSCONFIG in the run dialog box? You sound pretty pc savy and I assume you have, but thought I would throw that out.The only registry product I have found to be worth anything is Uniblue's RegistryBooster 2. However, it is not freeware and if you do a re-format, it will be useless. How much space does he have left on his hard drive? Not much space can cause problems with the swap file, even if you think you have tons of memeory.

Although he may have plenty of ram, sometimes adding sticks that are not compatible with what you have can cause huge slowdows, if it boots at all. If he hasn't added ram lately, ignore this.

Anyhoo, nothing works better then deleting programs. (reformatting is THE KING in problem resolving, althought it creates problems of its own) If he has a anti-virus on board and you have run that, also try some freebie online scanners like In Trend Micro's HouseCall, or Bit-Defender Online. Ad-aware has always been trusty too. 2nd and 3rd anti-virus/malwarae opinions = good.

Another good site for troubleshooting slow computers is PCSTATS.com. Try this article
for performance tips

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1590

Thanks Tim, Crash. We installed Registry Mechanic, found 119 problems, fixed them and now his machine is running well again. Not sure how registries get so messed up, but it appears that was the culprit.