BleepingComputer.com: Computer running extremely slow

Hi, I am new to the forums. I hope I'm posting in the right place. I'm just an average computer user and not very good at technical things so please be patient with me.

I have an Acer Inspire 5736Z laptop which I mostly use for browsing the internet and playing some games. It still has 100gb free on the hard drive, and 3gb of ram. I have had it about 10 months. Yesterday a game I was playing crashed, and around the same time a Spybot pop-up appeared which said:

Category: Session manager
Change: Value deleted
Entry: BootExecute
Old data: autocheck autochk *
New data: [greyed out]

I was unable to click Allow Change or Deny Change because the laptop had frozen. I waited several minutes and tried to shut the game down using Task Manager processes, but nothing worked. In the end I shut it down by holding down the power button.

When I restarted the laptop was going extremely slowly. I'm talking 5-10 minutes to open a blank Notepad. I don't know if it's to do with the Spybot message or if I damaged something by restarting in that way.

This is what I have done so far. It is all guesswork on my part so I don't know if it was pointless:

- Started in safe mode. Everything runs very quickly. I started up my usual background programs one by one: Avast, Spybot, ZoneAlarm, iTunes, Audible download manager and OpenOffice. It still ran quickly.
- Ran CCleaner and deleted unncessary files, but it only amounted to about 400mb.
- Performed an Avast scan. Came up clean.
- Performed a Spybot scan. It reached the end and then froze before showing the results.
- Tried to use Spyboy's recovery but I think the CCleaner deleted those files because there was no recovery data :/
- Uninstalled the game that crashed, and other programs that I no longer use.
- Started again in normal mode, still going painfully slow there.

I am writing from my husband's laptop. Can anybody advise me what the problem could be or how I can diagnose/fix it?

I have just posted on the Spybot forums to try and find out if the message is related.

What happens if you uninstall Spybot?

As suggested by LucheLibre, it is best to removed spybot in your system . Secondly, games are not meant for compact computers such as laptops especially intensive ones. They are prone to get more heat related problems as compared to CPU towered desktops.

I have uninstalled Spybot and there is no improvement.

Possibly worth reading, http://forums.spybot.info/showthread.php?t=43349 .

I would try running the chkdsk /r command, based on premise that you have key files damaged.

Louis

Thanks for the replies

I found out how to restore the autocheck function to its default value which I did, and nothing changed. So I decided to do a complete system restore as there was nothing on my laptop that I needed, everything important was backed up. I used the recovery partition to restore it to factory settings but it was unable to setup again, so I assumed the hard drive was damaged. It is still in warranty so it has now been sent off to Acer.

Thanks for updating us, happy computing .

Louis