I think I found the cause of my computer's sluggishness. It's not Windows 10, thank goodness. Somehow a piece of "potentially unwanted software" got installed, but it went undetected by two different anti-virus programs and two different anti-malware programs, and I had to uninstall it manually.
Kor
That's the frustrating thing I can't seem to get through a friend of mine's head. He seems to think one running anti-virus program will keep his computer clean. That even if it finds something, it'll clean it up completely. And that the program will also keep any possible instrusions out from real-time checking. Or that he can just install multiple programs and that would be that.
I was completely unable to get him to understand basic stuff, no matter how many times I tried to tell him. He couldn't get that a program only finds what it knows to look for and that any guesses, are jsut that -- guesses, which can be wrong or just false positives. Or that one program will not find everything or even find anything at all and that it can give false positives, so you run multiple scans from different kidns of programs. And it took me having to try and install another anti-virus program on the computer and having it fail because there was already one on there, to get him to understand that doesn't really work. Some dipshit from where he got his computer, knew that, but sold him the seperate disc with another program anyway. And then I tried to tell him there are not only different kinds of programs for different kinds of threats but that one key thing you also need to do is run them in Safe Mode, so they programs cant' get access to the internet and potentially re-sintall themselves or something else. Nope, didn't register with him.
His program was going to sites he shouldn't have been going to, to the point he got infected multiple times and at one point called a phone number that came up on one of the pop-up scam sites, for help getting his comptuer uninfected, and broguht the phone to me. Get ready for this shit -- this is mind boggling:
* He called the number.
* He let the guy talk him into letting the scammer into his computer over the web (who knows what this guy did to it).
* The scammer, some Indian dude, then convinced him his other computer was infected, too, the one I was on at the moment he handed me the phone, and that the Indian guy needed to get into it, too, to help clear up the mess.
* And that to clear up the mess, my friend needed to buy a yearly subscription to some program that costed several hundred dollars. And he was going to do it.
I sniffed this loser scammer out and pretended to play dumb and get his number and call him back. LOL, no way.
I worked on the computer, cleaned it up the best I could without expert help, then told me friend the absolute idiocy of what happened: he
honestly thought that HP was monitoring what he was doing online in real time, saw that he got infected, poppped up a window with some number to call an HP representative. Good God. Even then, I could not get him to understand it doesn't matter what the scammer says, the scammer is lying; he can say he works for any company. He couldn't get (he's fallen for somethign similar before). And he still thought getting the scam program that costs hundreds of dollars was needed, but I had to tell him again this was some scammer trying to bilk him out of hundreds and hundreds of dollars.
Anyway, the comptuer ended up being screwed up enough, we found out later, that he had to get a new computer. He finally found some tech guy who told him what he wanted to hear: that he needed this certain progam and he'd be okay, so he said the tech guy told him what I had used was shit (which it wasn't, plus I never said it was for real-time protection anyway). He ignored me, thought this one program was a cure-all, ignored my warnigns about the stupid sites and practices he was doing online, and in short order promptly got his computer so screwed up, that he re-installed windows without asking me for help. I don't know if he picked that up from the tech guy or if he got it elsewhere, but I found out that happened.
I tried to help keep his computer clean, but anytime something didn't work right or he didn't have some button on Yahoo or Gmail that was wholly unecessary and only for stupidly lazy people who can't tape into the address bar, he blamed the scans. I eventually stopped working on his computer. I washed my hands of it. I'm sure it's infected now or any time it gets messed up he does what he thinks will be a cure-all and re-install Windows again. The day will come some keylogger of hack will get personal information or that he'll get some vicious piece of malware that doesn't go away even when re-installing Windows, and he'll learn a hard lesson. Eh, probably not.
By the way,
Kor, make sure you run the programs in Safe Mode as well. And as an added bonus for a program you don't have to install if you dont' want (though a definitions library is temporarily downloaded), you can try the deep one-time free scanner was ESET online.