When Your PC Slows Down
Joe M posted in Home Support, free stuff on February 4th, 2010
You just got home from work, or school.
You turn on your machine to get the lastest look at Facebook or Twitter.
You wait.
And wait.
And Wait.
And WAIT.
AND WAIT.
Something has happened to your Windows OS.
It’s slow. The screen is black, blank or just shows a blue background with an hourglass.
You may not be a computer expert, but you don’t have to be to know there is something wrong.
Chances are… you either have some malware or some form of a virus… or virusES.
Having had several machines to fix over the past few months for virus and malware issues, this article at MakeTechEasier sparked my interest.
The main idea is to boot your machine on something other than Windows.
The article focuses on using a Live Linux CD.
These days, major strides have been made in Linux and software development, especially in booting the OS.
You can download an ISO image file, burn it to CD and boot up your Windows machine.
Since you are booting off of something other than the hard drive, the nasty items that slow down Windows will not affect the boot process.
One of the caveats in getting the PC to boot off of the CD may lie in making changes in the BIOS.
Since each machine BIOS is different, there is no one set of instructions for making the necessary changes.
When your machine starts, there is usually a text screen that displays within a few seconds.
If you look for the options on the screen, you will see a listing for the key to get into the BIOS.
Once you get into the BIOS, if you explore, you should find some boot order options.
Among these you should find the hard drive, optical drive (CD or DVD) and USB.
You can configure the order that the machine will try to boot these items.
You want to put the CD or DVD drive first in the boot order.
There are also options for making a USB drive bootable.
(Older machines do not offer the USB booting option.)
If you happen to run into problems, Google is your friend.
Read the article at MakeTechEasier to see the details for the rest of the scanning process.