okay i know i've been asking alot of help with computers but mine is a POS! i restarted my computer tonight and it took 1 1/2 hrs for it to completely load for me to do anything on it and when it finally loaded my Norton virus program says its expired even tho before I restarted it said i had 182 days left.. dont know what wrong with that.. my main concern is how do i get my computer to be faster? when i bought it, it was a lot faster than it is now. i cant really explain it..

also when i bring up the task manager window its always saying the CPU is at 100% and that i have 68 processes running i dont think that is a good thing not sure tho... but any help will be great...

ask questions as needed and i will try to answer them the best i can.... Thanks Nick

My first recommendation would be to run Disk Cleanup under your accessories folder (Start Menu -> Programs -> Accessories)...

Second, if you have a bunch of little icons down in the lower right-hand corner of your screen next to the clock, right-click them and go to their preferences in each program and disable the options "Start when windows starts" or "automatically start/login when i start my computer" and the sort. Some, like Quicktime, simply say "Install system tray icon". Make sure you set these options to off, they eat memory. Also, be sure you don't have any pointless programs that you don't need under your Startup folder (Start Menu -> Programs -> Startup)

After this, I would recommend running Disk Defragmenter, which can be found in the same location as Disk Cleanup.

Lastly, judging by what you said in your post, especially about Norton suddenly choking like that, it sounds like you may have viruses and/or adware/spyware running on your comp. That'* an awful lot of processes running upon startup. I would highly recommend downloading a couple of programs to see about this. I have used both Ad-Aware and BitDefender. While they aren't guaranteed to find everything, they are a good start. You can download these freely at http://www.download.com

If you have any questions, just ask! Hope this helps!

Another good one to download is spy-bot search and destroy.

Any easy way to clean your computer, and verify hidden startup file is a program called CCleaner.

Be careful, though, some of those hidden star up files are important.

As for those 68 processes, start running them through Google. You'll learn what they are and if you need them

take the drive out and run a few different av/anti-spyware programs against it from another computer. This is the fastest way to make sure all the **** is taken out.

thanks for the help....

while running my task manager in google, I have came across a a virus now my question is how do i get rid of it now?

The site where you figured out it was a virus should tell you how to fix it

wow thanks for the very fast reply

There'* also a place on symantec.com that you can search for specific fixes....