Hi Tosh,
There is lots of junk that accumulates on a computer over time. Let's start by getting rid of some of it.
Click
Start | Settings | Control Panel | Internet Options. Click on
Delete files and check the box marked
Delete all offline Content. When that's done, click on
Clear History.
The next one to clear is the
Cookies file. First though, make sure that you have all your passwords written down for forums such as this.. or check to see that you still have the confirmation e-mails for them.
Once you're happy that you won't have to re-register to all these sites, then click on
Delete Cookies.
If you haven't ever cleaned these out before, and you say the PC is 18 months old, you could have literally 10's of thousands of files here, and just getting rid of those could speed up the PC no end.
Try that first.. see if it makes a difference.. if not, then please download 'Hijack This!' from
here, unzip, and place it in it’s own folder, (not in the temp folder, or on the desktop) doubleclick HijackThis.exe, and hit "Scan". When the scan is finished, click "Save Log", and copy and paste it in a reply.
This will give us a rundown of what’s going on in your PC. One of us here will be glad to analyse it for you.
Don’t fix anything yourself yet, as a lot of the stuff on that list will be harmless or required.
Cheers
Liam