Freezing & Program crashes since utorrent!

[Coops2007]

Hi all,

i DLed uTorrent yesterday morning before work and everything was fine. Came back to a incredibly slow computer, often with the majority of my programs/folders freezing & "not responding" then shutting down. (films etc also freeze and the sound jolts too)

Also, ive rebooted a bunch of times today and every time it seems my virus software has been turned off by something - i manually switch it all back on again, but on reboot another random aspect of it is turned off.

i've read the FAQ and found the section on "My µTorrent/PC freezes or locks up every 30 seconds and/or uses 100% CPU, slowing down my PC (Avast!, possibly others)" but dont have "Avast!" or any p2p shield anyway...

i removed uTorrent (as it works better on my other comp) however my computer is still very slow and crashing often - even after running virus scans, malicious software remover to make sure it wasnt a virus or other nasty.

wondering what i can do to try and sort this problem out if any one has any ideas? even shutting down my comp is painful as takes 15mins to restart!!

for info, using:

McAfee Security Centre

Windows Vista (with the Windows Firewall etc)

and its an Inspirion 6400

(not sure if this is useful, im afraid im very bad with computers so please use laymans terms etc!!!)

any help would be greatly appreciated as i have dissertations to finish!!

many thanks.

Coops

[Ultima]

Start > Run > devmgmt.msc

Check the primary and secondary IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers' properties to see if any of their current transfer modes are in PIO.

[Firon]

McAfee is kinda junky, might wanna try removing it.

[Coops2007]

checked my IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, and although have no idea what PIO is, didnt see it anywhere, all said working fine etc...

as far as removing mcafee goes, only problem is i paid for the 18month subs when i got the new comp, is it really that bad that its worth replacing? is the free AVG one good enough? or, could you suggest any others?

thanks again

[Switeck]

Go get HijackThis and/or Process Explorer. They're both free system utilities. The first shows what loads on boot-up and what seems to be loaded at the time the program is run, the second shows what's running in memory real-time.

Take a look at how MUCH McAfee insists on running on your computer.

[Coops2007]

turned my comp on to run those things and now i cant do anything because Windows Explorer crashes every 10seconds :s this even happened in Safe Mode...

im severly stumped and frustrated with this!

thanks for the help anyway guys, any more ideas will be useful - going to try a re-format or windows or, god forbit, ring my IT tech bloke to take it away & magic it back to health!