Fishing out Impurities in your PC

Hello all! I am trying to figure out why my computer is running a little slower than usual lately. Aside from own personal surfing habits (I admit, probably the reason why I'm going through this), what is the best way for me to find out unnecessary running processes in the task manager? I use avast anti-virus but that seems to take forever just to do a system scan. Back several months ago when I had a serious virus/trojan infection on my computer, I remember having to disconnect my network cable and go in to safe mode and manually delete registries that were files showing up when i did a system scan or locating them in the task manager. If it helps any, I can post a list of processes running on my task manager in case anyone is familiar with any of the files. I've used applications like unhack me and hijack this. If i'm doing something wrong or could be doing something differently, please some one inform me. Thanks folks!

Hello,
The first thing I would like to do is advise you to read the topics in the mal-ware forum.
Looking for things that slow down your machine can be tricky. I suggest that you look up anything that you are not sure of on google.
Things that start up at boot like HP's digital imaging, messenger programs, can be disabled from running until you use them in msconfig,.
Click on the start button and select run (for XP, or just type it for Vista)
Type msconfig
When the msconfig utility comes up select start up.
Post a screen shot of this as well as your running processes in task manager.
But please keep in mind that the mal-ware experts at the malware forums are the only ones to help you with viruses or spyware.

I'm new here so am a little wary about suggesting scans to run, the pro's may not like it as it could make their job harder, but have you actually run any scans other than Avast ?
And a point to note, when you launch Avast, you can click on settings, and you can set it to do a boot time scan, sometimes an infection fights the scan process when the system is running, scanning at boot makes it harder for any infection to fight back, so I mention that as a thought for you.

But infections aside there are a few things that can help, get and run CleanUp, Disk Cleaner and CCleaner (also get and extract Winapp2.ini to the programs folder for even deeper cleaning), these will remove junk\temp files which will help the system, and each find files the other misses, but bare in mind if you use cookies to avoid logging in to sites each time these will be wiped, so make sure you know your login details before running these to be safe, you can of course select cookies to protect so they are not removed when cleaning, that way it only wipes the unwanted ones, I mention that so your aware.
Now I would suggest getting WinPatrol, it's a fantastic bit of kit, and you can view your start up programs and see what services are running, you can stop\remove\disable anything that you don't want running, so should be a great help in controlling whats running, it also protects your Host's file as well, so round it is in simple terms a tool everyone should have IMHO.

The other thing that will help is running a defrag, Smart Defrag is free and one of the best out there, you can set it to do a scheduled scan and never need worry again until theres an update, as a badly fragged drive has a performance hit, another suggestion to minimise clutter is to reduce the size of system restore to about 3%, if you haven't done this the default is 12% for xp (15% for Vista), so it can quickly eat up a lot of space.
See if this helps any and report back, it may be a wise move to get a check up from the pro's, especially if you have reason to suspect you may be infected, but see if this helps first, good luck.

Lets look at what runs at start up first before using any scans or automated programs. While system restore can take up space it will not slow the machine down unless there is very little space left so lets leave that alone for now. I would like to look at what is running and then have the malware staff take over.

Alright, Thank you very much guys. I appreciate the response! Sorry for blurting out questions when I probably could have read the forums. Hope it's not an inconvenience. Please bare with me too folks, I'm working from the ground up to hopefully one day be a proficient IT guy like most of you are right now. All advice and opinions are accepted!

Alright, I've got the screen shots. Had to do a little editing in order to post them as attachments on here. I can go ahead and look for some utilities that were mentioned but I think I'm going to wait till I hear from one of the techs before I start anything. Thanks again for your time people. P.S. I'll be posting a separate reply with the task manager processes as well. I ran out of room with the first attachment.

Here are the task manager processes!

Under start up disable ALL except for ashdisp as thats your anti virus, but use WinPatrol to do this, even BlackViper warns against using msconfig for most people, there are a couple of optional ones if you wanted though, Reader_sl is one I let run as it helps load pdf files quicker, but unless you view a lot of pdf files it's not worth it, next is jusched, unless you remember to check for Java updates it may be worth letting that run, and finally teatimer, if you want to use the tea timer component of Spybot then leave it active, if not load Spybot, then go into the settings and uncheck the use teatimer component rather than try to disable it.

The services are not as easy to say, each individual process needs to be identified so you know what it is for before doing anything with them, so my best advice here is go to the following links, first BlackViper and go through his services tweak guide to turn off unnecessary items, then after that should you see a service that your not sure about, search for it the the other link here to see exactly what it does and what the recommended course of action is for that item, hope this helps.
http://www.blackviper.com/
http://www.processlibrary.com/directory/