Computer got really slow after sending to comnputer shop?

my friend sent me his computer to try and fix. He has a 3.3 p4, 1gb ram. he bought it new and took 2 min to start up. he got lots of viruses and then installed mcafee and malwarebytes cuz he didnt know what a virus was (but the computer still took around 2 min to start up) and sent it to a computer shop to fix. the comp shop got rid of all the viruses. after getting it back from the comp shop it takes 5 min to start up.

i've done all the standard stuff for him, defrag, virus scan, malware scan whatever scan, hd error checking, disk cleanup, reg check... the computer shop he sent it to was sketch (cuz it was cheap) and i suspect they did something to it to make my friend come back. but does anyone have any experience with this kind of thing?

EDIT: when i said the comp shop did something, i don't mean they took something out of the computer, they just did something to the OS to make him come back and pay for more repairs

 

Anytime someone has had a lot of viruses on their computer my advice is usually to format the drive and do a reinstall of the OS and applications.

 

Windows is rarely necessary. What operating system? describe the boot up--at what phase of the boot up is it taking a long time?

There are several distinct phases to every boot...you have hardware detection (bios), kernal load, driver load, profile load....where is it taking a real long time (what is on the screen)

 

make sure that the system hardware is as he expects.

The correct harddrive, cpu, memory, and bios settings.

No telling what the computer shop might have done.

 

You'd probably make more money counterfeiting pennies than by stealing a P4 and 1GB of DDR memory.

 

never know though, troubleshooting by starting with assumptions usually goes wrong

 

No doubt...one thing they might have done, for example, is changed the boot order so it would boot of a usbv drive (if bios supports it), so what would happen is your computer will try to boot off of whatever USB device you have (a printer, for example), until it finally gives up and moves on to your cd-rom and harddrives.

 

welcome screen, takes really long to load the icons and other stuff. checked msconfig only mcafee, malware and microsoft language startup

 

btw--I mean REINSTALLING windows is rarely necessary. Hmmm, interesting slip, eh?

The Welcome screen is one thing, You mean it take a long time for the "welcome screen" to load--meaning, the USER NAME icons on the welcome screen, or after you CLICK the profile name it takes a long time for your PROFILE to load.

If the latter, do you have a lot of folders on your desktop with a lot of files in them?

Did we determine this is XP or Vista or Windows 7?

 

ok sorry for the vagueness. this is windows xp sp2 32 bit and there are no profile logins, just the admin, so it loads without having to type in password or choose a profile. the screen says welcome. it dissapears, and the desktop loads so slow its maddening. each icon comes up one at a time

he has about 10 icons on screen, normal windows cloud wallpaper, (mcafee and malware did nothing to slow startup because they were installed before the computer turned slow)

 

Still, what ever they did could have affected Macfee. You'd do best by uninstalling with revo uninstaller in advanced mode and installing Avira free.

 

Create a new profile (temporary step)

Reboot. log into that profile. The first log in will take a while because the actual profile is not created until the first log in.

Reboot again.

Log into the new profile again. Is the problem present?

 

hey gerryf19, that really helped! i cut down the startup time by 2 minutes and the speed of the computer really speeded up! (although it didn't restore the computer back to tthe full speed...)