Need for Speed... on laptop

[Elheru Aran]

Hey,

So I'm reintroducing my wife's laptop to the Internet after about a two-year hiatus. I gotta admit it's going pretty slow; it moves okay, but not superbly. I plan to defragment the hard drive today. It's Windows XP, circa... 2003, 2004, and I just downloaded most of the Microsoft automatic updates. It's running Symantec Antivirus, but I don't know how good that is, and it has Ad-Aware (not sure if that's updated either).

So what I'm looking for is:
- Free antivirus to back up the Symantec; I used to have AVG, but I don't know if that's still good
- Free software to optimize my computer and help it run faster (EDIT: Something that knocks down the number of processes running at one time, basically)
- Free anti-adware/spyware

Thank you all for your help...
~El

[The_Saint]

Process Explorer << look at all running processes and find either anything hogging resources or anything that's running that shouldn't.

CCleaner << basically a hired maid for the guts of the computer... cleans browser chache files, temporary ssytem files, etc etc...

AVAST anti virus is free and works for me..... been a while since I ran ad-aware but my ancient version has picked up stuff for years...

[fractalsponge1]

Malwarebytes' Antimalware is a good malware scanner.

For antivirus, Microsoft Security Essentials is actually a rather fast and lightweight alternative to SAV, and it's free.