Over the past week my machine has started booting and running very slowly. Opening programs, especially IExplorer, regularly leads to 'not responding' and will be like that for a minute or two, then start running again. Recently installed HP printer package, thought that may be the problem as I had major headaches installing it. Uninstalling it didn't help.
Then things got weird.
When booting, NIS didn't load and got Support screen saying reboot may help, if not uninstall and reinstall.
Reboot did load NIS but when I tried a Full System Scan it was sooooo slow I aborted. Also noted PC clock was 10 minutes fast ... never noticed this before. Reset time and used Norton removal program to uninstall and reinstall NIS.
Full system scan was still slow but let it run ... it took 15 hours to run compared to normally 5 hours. It found nothing and the summary stated the scan took 19.5 hours !!! PC clock also ran fast to nearly 2 hours ahead of time. When scan finished, I reset time and it so far is fine.
Since reinstalling, a Full System Scan and 4 Idle Time scans have found nothing and I find this very strange as I regularly pick up 8-10 tracking cookies between Idle scans alone.
I'm left wondering if the problem is software, such as NIS, virus or hardware. I've been reading about clock problems arising from CMOS or motherboard issues but with the clock only running fast (so far) while running NIS scans, I don't think so.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Please note that I'm in no way technically minded so please keep replies in a language the average moron can understand :)