help needed - browser sluggish

[evil homer]

i'm hoping someone has some ideas for me. the last couple of days, my browser has slowed to a crawl when loading pages. i use firefox, and my wife uses IE7, but both are having the issue. i have already done the following:

run full virus scan - clean
run spybot search and destroy - didn't help
ran adaware - didn't help
ran malwarebytes - didn't help
cleaned out recycle bin - there were over 17000 files from some old OOTP leagues i cleaned out, but this didn't help either.
ran windows defender scans - no help
cleaned out the cache in both browsers and no help either.

my internet service is verizon fios. i unplugged and reset the router, but that did not help either. my work laptop has no issues at all, so it is confined to my home laptop. download speeds are still very fast (over 1MB/sec), so it has to be something on the computer (i guess???). the funny part is that nothing else is slow. applications like Word, Excel, OOTP, etc all run fine with no slowdowns. is there anything else i can run to try to isolate the problem?

[JonInMiddleGA]

Just off the top of my head, it sounds like maybe you've got some setting that's changed somewhere. Maybe your virus scan has been turned up a notch or two and it's slow checking pages? Maybe some setting (whatever the wording is) about reloading pages fully instead of using cached images when available got tweaked somewhere (although with 2 browsers involved that seems kind of unlikely).

And even with all the scans coming up empty, maybe check to see if there's something running in the background that you don't recognize, something sending web usage tracking info somewhere maybe? (I'm drawing a blank on an example by name but the kind of things where you get some minor benefit in return for having every site you visit reported to a ostensibly legit tracking service)

I'm sure our actual experts will be along with better & more detailed advice, but maybe that gives you some other stuff to explore in the meantime.

[MikeVic]

Stop with all the porn.

[BYU 14]

May be some issues with the registry. Easycleaner is a good free program I have used for some time. May not hurt to give it a shot


http://personal.inet.fi/business/toniarts/ecleane.htm