Why is my computer running so slowly?

My lovely Dell laptop computer has been driving me insane for two weeks. I have had this laptop for six years and naturally believed that it had seen its day. I kept telling myself, it is time to buy a new laptop. However, a couple days ago, I signed onto my old aol account to check my email. Mind you, I had not checked my aol email account in two months. I was sorry that I had not checked it sooner because I had over 50 emails by one person containing the same message. In addition, there were multiple extensions of an email attachment in which I had recently opened. While I was deleting these emails, I began contemplating the likelihood of my laptop being afflicted with a computer virus.

Running down the checklist of computer virus symptoms, my computer had been running slower than usual, frequently stopped responding, crashed and would restart itself every few minutes and weird error messages would pop up. Even though these symptoms are signs of a computer virus, I cannot say with certainty that a computer virus had infiltrated my laptop. According to Microsoft Support, the aforementioned signs could be caused by hardware or software problems that have nothing to do with computer viruses. A possible solution to this problem is to perform a clean backup of my hard drive more frequently. After I cleaned my hard drive, my computer began running properly.

Currently, AOL Spyware Protection and Spybot Search and Destroy are both installed on my computer to protect against viruses. The good news is neither one of these programs detected any viruses within my computer. Yay!

A few years ago, I deleted viruscan from my computer because it appeared to bring annoying pop-ups. After I deleted the program, I didn't have nearly as many pop-ups. However, viruscan appears to be the most commonly used package to guard against computer viruses. I am not quite sure if I am willing to reinstall McCafee viruscan on my computer. However, I am currently looking into installing f-prot from Frisk Software and Thunderbyte from Thunderbyte B.B as antivirus software packages. The website below discusses both f-prot and Thunderbyte software. Feel free to check out the website. http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/virus32.html