Does my laptop have a virus?

This is what has been happening over the last few days...I need some help in determining what is wrong.

In Outlook (2003 SP2), clicking from one email to the next takes about 2 seconds to change over and show in the preview window. Before, it was practically instantaneous as it should be. Also, when I write an email out, it takes about 5 seconds for the letters to show that I have typed. Like it is on a delay or something. Everything in it is really slow.

In Firefox (my primary browser), browsing speed doesn't seem affected but I have noticed one thing that started the same time as my Outlook problems. Some web pages will automatically display "cannot find server at ......." when I type the URL in and hit enter. I have to hit refresh a time or two for it to load the page. This is not something that happened this regularly before.
Like I said, this all started about 2 days ago and is ongoing right now.

I am using XP.
I have both Anti-Vir and Avast as Anti-software. Anti-vir is my active one and Avast I use as a backup. I updated virus definitions on both and ran thorough scans. Anti-vir came up with nothing and Avast found 4 adawares. No affect on these problems.
So, am I infected with something? Anyone know what it could be and how I can fix it?

Thanks!

 

may not be a virus, have you updated your software recently and deleted all of your junk files? does it only do it in Outlook?

 

You may try to download CCleaner (free, works great) and see what kind of junk is stored in there and clean it out. As tphilly1984 said you may just have alot of stuff in there that needs cleaning.

 

I ran Crap Cleaner...will that delete all junk files? Is there another step I should perform?
Yes, only Outlook delays my typing out of an email. As I am typing this in Firefox, no issues.

 

It should, but only the files you select by the check boxes. You should also do a registry cleaning with cc and backup the changes which it should ask you to do before you delete the entries. Next, just in case do a disc cleanup Start>Accessories>System Tools>Disc Cleanup or if you have Vista then type disc cleanup in the search box.

 

I leave Firefox up when I ran CCleaner so it gave me the message that it would not clear internet cache. Should I go ahead and exit Firefox so that it can do this? Do you think that will have an affect?

 

Yes, it won't clean the cache while you have Firefox running.

 

Okay, ran CCleaner again clearing EVERYTHING. did the backup registry too. Then I ran the Windows disc cleaner that wingsbr suggested.
Doesn't seem to have any affect. Outlook is still very slow to respond to any command. Emails take about 5-10 seconds to populate in the preview window. Typing out emails is still delayed.
There seems to be some sort of deeper problem. Any other thoughts/suggestions?

 

Dang =( First try a reboot and see if that changed anything. Also can you backup your emails and do an uninstall, reinstall of outlook or office?

 

By the way, what about the Firefox issue, any resolution on that front?

 

It doesn't sound like a virus but try doing a ping of the sites your trying to access just to check it isn't a connection problem. Also you could try doing trackert to check that the route that the sites taking across the lines isn't damaged. It probably isn't but it's just a suggestion.

 

What firefox issue? Is there something I should check in it? How do I backup my emails...(I have 300+ of them) before I uninstall and reinstall outlook?

 

You could try uninstalling one of the anti-viruses. They tend to interfer with each other, so having more than one installed at the same time is not a good idea. You could also try to defrag. And see if something is using you HDD alot.

 

I was checking on this one, sorry for the confusion :laugh: :smile:

I am doing this off of memory so bear with me (I'm at work, network computer). On your C drive their is a Doc's and Settings folder. In this folder there is your user name, in that folder their should be Application Data and then Microsoft or something like that. That is where your emails are stored. Hopefully someone else can post more about the location, but I used this to back up my emails before. You could also search google as well which is how I found how to do it.

 

I checked for updates and FF reported none so everything is up to date. I can deal with this issue for now. Browser is generally working fine and some of it may stem from my internet provider.
I will check into the backing up email thing.
Do you think it is wise just to migrate over to the Mozilla email system? I don't know much about it but this may be a good time to do this.

 

First you need to export all of your mail from Outlook into Outlook Express. To do this go into Outlook Express and go to tools>import and tell it to import your mail from Outlook into Express.

Second you download Mozilla Thunderbird and during or after your install it will ask you if you want to import your mail (can't remember exactly where during the process) from Outlook Express. Then you are all set.

I want to caution you on one thing. Make sure that you really want to use Thunderbird before you switch. It is a lot harder to go back to Outlook then it is to go to Thunderbird. It's not impossible but requires some more work then going to open source, mostly because of Outlook's proprietary mail format.

(Again most of this from memory, if you get caught on a step post it and I'll go home this evening and check it when I can use my home lappy.)

 

Got Thunderbird up and running. So far, I love it. No more Outlook for me. It is running great. Totally cleaned up the system which is speeding things up a bit. I ran Spybot and it found quite a few things. I'm glad to get those cleared up.
Thanks for everyone's help.

 

No problem. Glad to hear all worked well for you. You should try some extension in Thunderbird, they work great and some of them are very helpful.

 

Funny---My outlook 2003 has started doing th esame thing--click on an email and takes 3-5 seconds for it to show!! I have done everything said here and more to no avail....Switching over to whatever email is NOT the fix. Just weird it started and now someone else has it too.

By the way MCFLY did you run Advance windows care on your computer? seem mine started doing this after multiple scans and deleting stuff that AWC had found?? May or may not be the problem