xp home running slow

[Mark Needham]

Hi,
I will give you a bit of background first.
The computer was bought second hand for my mother in law (no operating disks).
Only 256ram, but from blogs this should be ok.
It is only used for internet browsing, word processing and digital photo storage (not many about 100).
She said she was having problems with microsoft updates. When I had a look at it, it didn't have sevice pack 2, and that was stopping the updates. I got hold of sp2 and installed and then downloaded 82 updates.
I noticed it was running very slow at startup, shut down, and both on line and when not connected to the internet. She confirmed that it had been running slow.
I tried Disk Cleanup, remove cookies, defrag, and stopped most programs loading at start-up, all with no change.
I then started to go through the viruses/spyware/malware, preliminary removal instructions.
I followed as much as I could;
step 11 - no installed rootkits
spet 13 - could not start safe mode - used f8 went to the list of uses, as soon as I chose one it rebooted, so step 14 was done in normal startup.
Attached Hijackthis, AVG antispyware and Combofix logs
Is anything in these causing the slow running?
Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[DelJo63]

for a certainty; 512 ram would enhance your responsiveness.

deleting Norton Security and installing COMODO + AVG Free would also lighten
the load. HEY! You already have AVG Anti-Spyware 7.5 so NS is competing with it

"c:\program files\bt yahoo! internet\DialBTYahoo.exe" and
C:\PROGRA~1\Yahoo!\browser\ybrwicon.exe
are unnecessary and adds overhead

I disabled C:\WINDOWS\system32\ctfmon.exe a long time ago!

 

[Mark Needham]

Does my HiJackThis log look ok?

I disabled C:\WINDOWS\system32\ctfmon.exe a long time ago!

What does ctfmon.exe do? How do I disable it?

Thanks
Mark

 

[Mark Needham]

Would you expect very slow running of xp on a 933mhz and 256mb of ram toshiba laptop?
Should I consider reinstallation of xp or will I still get a very slow performance?

 

[TimeParadoX]

Would you expect very slow running of xp on a 933mhz and 256mb of ram toshiba laptop?

Windows XP is recommended to use 512mb RAM ( minimum ), You could look up the spec of the RAM for your laptop and try and upgrade it.

 

[AlbertLionheart]

ctfmon.exe - visit http://support.microsoft.com/kb/282599 for all there is to know....

 

[Bobbye]

Mark, was the computer clean when you got it? Had the hard drive been wiped, or did it come with the inheritance from the previous owner?

Reinstalling Win XP isn't going to help much if it's still low on RAM and hard drive space. The processor is likely a P3 933MHz and by today's standards, this isn't a fast processor. Most now run in GHz. If the connection is dial-up, it's going to be slow.

Here is information on cftmon.exe: CTFMon is involved with the language/alternative input services in Office XP. CTFMON.exe will continue to put itself back into MSConfig when you run the Office XP apps as long as the Text Services and Speech applets in the Control Panel are enabled. Not required if you don't need these features.

To simply turn off ctfmon.exe: Control Panel> Regional and Language Options> Languages> Details> Advanced> check the box that says "Turn off advanced text services."

 

[Mark Needham]

The computer was bought for my mother-in-law by my brother-in-law and although it has been "tinkered with". I am pretty sure it still has some inheritance from the previous owner, although it doesn't have much in the way of programs on it.

I am fast coming to the conclusion that she needs to try more memory.

 

[AlbertLionheart]

Depending on what it is going to be used for - perhaps what you might call light domestic with some emails and browsing - why not consider either and old version of windows or linux?