malware problems in April treated, now laptop running slow

Hello,

I was referred here from the malware section of What The Tech. I'm running Windows XP home edition on a Dell Inspiron 4000 laptop (yes, it's 8 years old) and Firefox 3.0.11. I wrote into the malware forum a couple months ago because of a sketchy application called "Favorit" that appeared on my computer. Tomk helped me do some clean-up and we got rid of some trojans. My computer seemed to be functioning normally again.

Now I find the machine is running slow–taking a long time to load the desktop when I boot up, taking a long time to open applications. I was also not able to resolve a problem of losing hard drive space. That so-called application "Favorit" was weighing in at over 3 GB. When I "uninstalled" it, the program disappeared from my control panel, but it did not free up any hard drive space. The person who helped me in the malware forum thinks the remaining problem is probably not from malware. 9 of the 10 GB on my hard drive are taken up. To the best of my knowledge it should be showing me about half that. I am not much of a downloader–music, movies, photos… all rare for me. I transferred many of my personal photos to a USB key last summer, and when I did I could see that I had half the hard drive free. I do watch videos online frequently, so is it possible there a cache or temporary folder somewhere that I just can't find?

Is there any way for me to search on my hard drive to see what the biggest folders or space-eaters are? Also, when I hit CTRL+ALT+DEL, how many processes are actually supposed to be running on my system at a time?

I have attached a HijackThis log in the event that it tells you anything.

Thank you,
RainyDayInParis

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📎RainyDayHJTLog.txt

Hi RainyDayInParis (RDP from now on ), welcome.

A nice tool to get a visual picture of your hard drive is SequoiaView.

When you first run it, click on View then Options. Check "Show file and directory size" then click Apply and OK.
Next click on View then Colors. Click "Enable color scheme" then Apply and OK. Now select the root of C: from the drop down menu and make the window full screen.

That should show you very quickly where your drive space is going. Right click on any file or folder and select Explore, then you can delete it or look at it.

Follow the instructions here to clean up your hard drive: http://forums.whatthetech.com/How_clean_up…ce_t100889.html

Once that's done, download and run TFC - Temp File Cleanup by OldTimer. It will get rid of stuff the others miss. Read the instructions and be aware that it will close down running programs and your desktop so make sure you are not doing anything else when you run it. There is no installation, just unzip it and run TFC.exe.

Now run SequoiaView again and see the difference.

Also, once you've cleaned up your hard drive, please Run the PCPitstop Full Tests, here: PCPitstop Full Tests

You must use Internet Explorer as it needs to install an ActiveX program.

Note: Vista users with UAC must first Right-click IE - Select "Run as Administrator"

If you haven't already registered, Click - Sign up now! (left hand column in User Login)

Register and create a password
Accept the ActiveX component to allow your machine to run the Full Tests
Registering and accepting the ActiveX are both SAFE and FREE.

The Full Tests take less than 5 minutes for most machines.

Once you have your Results, please post the URL (the http:// stuff) back here into this thread for review. Post the entire URL address (link) information back here into this Forum thread.

Note: Vista users, please close your instance of IE "Running as Administrator" after you are finished reviewing your Results.

Caution: During the testing of Video Adapter, a variety of patterns, shapes, colors and text are “flashed” onto the users monitor screen. In the many thousands of daily uses of the PCPitstop Full Tests over several years, two individuals who suffer epilepsy experienced discomfort and temporary dizziness when viewing the flashing patterns.

If you know that you are susceptible to photo driven seizure, please look away from your screen during the Video Adapter testing sequence.

Note: The PCPitstop Full Tests Results is a free service, but is supported by various paid product advertisements for utilities that "could" remedy the OP's problem.

Since WTT is a "free-help" forum, we do not recommend or endorse purchase of automated utilities, and will assist you in manually correcting any problems and settings necessary to optimize your machine's performance. Ask your questions here. We'll help you walk through any necessary steps.