[sloop]

anyone that needs to wipe their drive and reload windows every year is not maintaining their pc

probably your virus scan running but check the task manager to see who is eating the cpu

if you do not have a solid state hard drive (and you probably don't), buy a good defrag product and use it periodically - i use raxco’s perfect disk - they have a free trial and it can even defrag your paging file

also use an optimization program - i use pcmatic - subscription is good for 5 computers

since you have had a virus, download malwarebytes (free version) and run it - it catches many problems and lots of nerds use it as a first step when fighting a virus

i’d do this

run windows update

run pcmatic, letting it update outdated programs, clean your registry, delete the temp files, cached files and such, shutdown crapware, update drivers, etc.

reboot and wait at least 10 minutes to let windows settle down

run perfect disk standalone

run perfect disk for the paging files and files in use that cannot be moved

then i’d probably run the perfect disk defrag again after windows settles down from its reboot

run malwarebytes

but if you are running norton, probably best to just slash your wrists and buy a new pc

[sloop]

if you use pcmatic, i do NOT use their defrag or their ‘shield’ virus stuff

also - when in the task manager, click the ‘cpu’ label at the top to sort the tasks - click once and the lowest task using the cpu is listed first - click it again and the highest is listed first - or verse vica stuff