I meant hard drive space. But that said, running a system with Vista on it and only 2GB RAM is no recipe for success. In fact that's the most logical explanation for your problems.

Is this a laptop or a desktop? Only I'd recommend upgrading it. If Vista is 64bit then go for at least 2GB. If not then even 1GB more would make a lot of difference.

Yip - and some people have it set to hide itself - so it might look like there are less than there really are. Expand it if necessary so you can see just how many there are. OK. Fine.

How much system memory (RAM) does the system have?
Ninja'd on the RAM.

Yeah, also your free HD space and how long have been using it?

4GB.

slowness is one thing, you could be getting "quick startered" to a crawl, but being unstable is quite another, and could be a symptom of larger issues. You might want to elaborate on that one.

And FYI Heavy games should be slower to start then light games. Noticing a particular game starts slower than it once did is a better comparison.

Possibly your firewall eats up a CPU, check for that in the task manager. If so, there is nothing to solve that short of disabling or uninstalling the firewall.

If your system is unstable then maybe the virus caused some havoc before you could remove it. You might need to do a repair install of Windows. Or maybe simply just format it and start over if you have the Windows install disc.

If your main problem is the system running slow and not instability (which can be much harder to fix), then there's a good chance the problem is due to lots of background processes running that aren't necessary. One fairly easy thing to examine is which processes are set initialize on startup. Go to Start->Run then type "msconfig". In the window that opens select the "Startup" tab which will give you a list of all processes set to initialize on startup. Some of them can be tough to figure out just what they are, but many are pretty obvious, then you can simply uncheck any processes you don't need or want initializing when your computer starts. This can give you a nice boost in performance just due to less unnecessary crap running in the background.

Now, if you're having significant stability issues on top of the performance issues then it may just be best to nuke the installation and start from a clean Windows install (but don't do this until you've tried the other suggested options).

With regard to msconfig: Anything in services can be removed without worry as it's all non-vital and won't stop WIndows from booting. But keep in mind that the things in here could include your anti virus and firewall along with any specific software you use for peripherals. But you can safely experiment with unchecking boxes in here to see what's necessary and what isn't.

Next to that is the services tab. I wouldn't mess with that unless you know exactly what you're doing. But it is a lot easier to figure out than Startup. Make sure you check the 'hide all Microsoft services" first. Then see what's left. If you think that anything isn't necessary then look it up or post about it here and hopefully someone will know if you can uncheck that or not.

I had this problem recently on both my PC's: After I had noticed the high CPU usage, I closed my firewall / security suite and everything was at least ten times faster. I then switched to another one.

Definitely worth a shot to test performance - just go offline before you shut it down.

I checked and it doesn't.

Yeah, especially if the poster has Windows Vista.

It really needs that extra disk space to work properly.

At some point, I had less than 30 GB to spare and my comp froze often.

Finally, I couldn't take it anymore and resolved myself to overpay ~20$ for an additional external hard drive during a special. I put my GOG collection on it and let's just say that freed over 100 GB of space (yes, my collection is big) and then the stability problems I experienced went away.

Try to keep your available disk space above 40 GB if you can with Vista.

I use Webroot for my Windows antivirus.

It's pretty lean.

The installer is like less than 5MB and it scans in less than 5 minutes.

The other lean alternative I know of is Eset, but I hate their guts, because their Antivirus behaves like spamware when your subscription expires (it's hell to uninstall and it keeps giving you those annoying popups that take the focus away from whatever else is running... great fun when you are playing a racing game).

When I got Webroot, I almost felt like sending Eset's customer service a message: "Hey, thanks for the non-stop advice you gave me about getting an up-to-date antivirus subscription. I did, just not with you."

I did say it recovered from the virus. Soon, it was up and running and playing TF2
Sorry, the chat is giving me crap. what i was going to say (replying to bold) was "I can ensure you I have over 40GB free."

Yeah, but it might have trashed some things. Removing the virus doesn't fix that any more than removing a squatter picks up all the used needles they leave behind. Alternatively Windows might just have been knackered just through general use. A fresh install can do wonders for that.