Dell Inspiron 531S De-Clogging

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Inspiron 531S. Born: July 2007
Athlon 64 X2 dual core 3800+, 2Ghz
Ram: 1.5Ghz
HD: 148G formatted; 50G in use, 99G free.
OS: W7 64b Enterprise SP1

A friend complained she couldn't use this thing at all. Upon start-up, I heard endless HD accessing, bringing the machine to its knees. With no applications running, background processes amounted to 51 and 85% of RAM capacity was being used! Small wonder.....

Task Manager (eventually) revealed MsMpEng.exe was consuming 338K of RAM and lots of HD R/W time. A search revealed this has something to do with MS forefront client security? I was able to end this process along with msmpeng.exe (I think). I also notice that svchost.exe (netsvcs) was high on RAM & CPU cycles being used.

I also found something called TrustedInstaller.exe? taking up many resources.

Not knowing much about W7, I moused around a bit. Seems four users were installed: System, Admin, Trusted Installer and User. TI had full priviledges across the board while the remaining three were limited to read & execute and read.

I was able to change TI's permissions to denied access(??) and for the first time in 45min. the HD stopped constantly churring and quieted down.

I uninstalled Mipony, chrome, unchecky?, goog toolbar and groove gfs browser?. Ran CCleaner, which removed 475Mb of junk & temp. Ran disk cleanup which found another 2.6Mb. Process count was down and so was cpu utilization. The machine was actually responsive & usable.

Ran an ESET on-line scan. Found nothing. De-frag'd & optimized HD using Auslogics SW.

Crucial and Corsair both stated this machine had four RAM slots and was limited to 4G of DDR2. When I split the case I found three 500Mb cards. I explained this was WAY to little RAM so we fixed that with an additional 4G using two 2G cards. OS now showed 5G being recognized.

Further, CPU HS was completely clogged with fuzz bunnies. Case & PS fan also showed lots of dust. Took care of this with air compressor.

However, she's unable to access her outlook email. Upon start, it immediately says it can't find the files or something. I asked if it had done this before and she said no, but really wasn't able to use it as the window continuously displayed (Not Responding) in the title bar. So something is FUBAR'd.

I attempted to locate the Outlook files and found them in a x86 folder. As I had worked on this for about 5hrs., that was enough for one day!

She's clueless about confusers and mentioned she took it somewhere. I replied they did her a great disservice allowing only 1.5G Ram for W7!

Q's:
1. How to get MS forefront client security to behave?
2. Ditto for Msmpeng.exe.
3. Process for restoring outlook functionality? (I don't use it).
4. Comments on four users mentioned above?
5. Further suggestions, comments?

Thanks!
 
^^Nope. She'd be really lost. Fortunately she does have a Dell LT running W7 for backup so she's gotten used to using it instead.
 
For memory, I use a place called Data Memory Systems.

They tell you how many slots, and OEM memory amount.
 
If memory serves: Msmpeng.exe. is an old core component of the Windows Defender.

As for MS forefront client security, I believe it's been discontinued...

It's better to clean up all of this and go with at least a freebie version such as Avast or AVG with active virus definitions.

Also: if it's Win7, you'll need at least 2~3GB worth of ram (depending on other backend startup programs, processes and loads) in order to run satisfactorily.

Q.
 
It does run much better with 5G of RAM. 1.5G is just ridiculous...even for XP!

I searched for WinDefen but no joy. She does need W7 updated. I just ran out of time. Didn't intend on spending so many hours on this......
 
Originally Posted By: sleddriver
3. Process for restoring outlook functionality? (I don't use it).

AFAIK, W7 does not use Outlook anymore. It got replaced with Windows Live Mail. So either reinstall that or just install some third party email client such as Mozilla Thunderbird.
 
Originally Posted By: Quattro Pete
Originally Posted By: sleddriver
3. Process for restoring outlook functionality? (I don't use it).

AFAIK, W7 does not use Outlook anymore. It got replaced with Windows Live Mail. So either reinstall that or just install some third party email client such as Mozilla Thunderbird.

She'd freak!
 
Make a live disc of ubuntu or similar distro and have her try it. Elementary os is a fork of ubuntu, very clean and easy to use for newcomers.
 
CPUs are measured in gigahertz - GHz

RAM is gigabytes - GB

Networks are in gigabits - Gb

Are we confused yet?

Anyway, you've lucked out on this machine by getting any measure of access back from within the infected Windows installation. But always remember what Uncle Ethan told you - you can never un-fsck a Windows installation from within the fscked Windows installation. Burn an AVG rescue CD or an avast rescue CD or a Bitdefender rescue CD or one of the many boot CDs that the antivirus vendors have come up with. I personally prefer AVG's offering. They're all free. Stick it in, set the BIOS to boot from CD, and let it do its thang. Then go back to Windows and replace Microsoft Security Essentials (your mysterious MsMpEng.exe) with avast free edition. You could probably fix MSE by adding the MSE exe to its own whitelist, but MSE's detection rates are not stellar.

Now you can think about throwing other anti-malware tools at this system. Malwarebytes is the biggest and baddest right now. Spybot is still really good, plus it has proactive measures which can protect the system from future infections.

Last, go into any and all of this chick's browsers and install adblock plus or ublock. Make sure to disable "allow unintrusive advertising". Now, the first two results on every google page will not be links to viruses.

There's not that much else you can do without convincing the user to change their behavior.
 
If you want to give it a whirl, it'll take a Saturday to do it. Many of my family members bring me their infected laptops.

First download and place on desktop: 1) RKILL, 2) COMBOFIX, 3) TDSKILLER, 4) MALWAREBYTES, and 5) CCLEANER. All are free and available via internet (Majorgeeks website for example). If your infected computer will not let you access internet or download, just do it on another computer and copy to a usb drive.

Start the infected computer in "safe" mode usually by pressing f8 when during the windows 7 splash screen when booting up. Run each of the programs above in the order listed until finished running.

It's a pain to do, but it usually works. Good Luck.
 
Also, 1.5 GB is not ideal for Windows 7, but not a deal breaker by any means. Figure out which ID had administrator rights and perform the above using that ID. Afterwards, remove MALWAREBYTES if you are running a different antivirus. Two different antivirus programs running simultaneously will usually compete with each other and bog thee system down.
 
Originally Posted By: sleddriver
1.5G is just ridiculous...even for XP!

What? 1.5 gigs of RAM is plenty for XP. That OS is 13 years old and systems of the day were being shipped with as little as 128 MB of RAM. 512 MB was the sweet spot, and anything above 1024 MB and you pretty much hit the wall of diminishing returns unless you were looking at spreadsheets all day.
 
windows 98 wouldnt even boot stably with over 512MB of ram in many cases.

winxp was great with 512MB

1GB was considered overkill when it came out.
 
WXP would work fine on lower RAM....as long as you didn't stream movies, kept the online ads + apps in check and not open too many browser windows. I'm still using XP. From personal experience I can report it's much happier on 3G of Ram than one with todays internet.
 
That's the full-meal-deal! ESET did give it a clean bill of health, and it's highly recommended, thus I doubt it's infected with anything.

I don't use Outlook, so don't know anything about it. Thanks for the suggestions.
 
Update:
Quickly solved the Outlook issue today. The answer was to go to OTLK properties > compatibility and turn it off. Then restart OTLK. This fixed it. It began downloading all the emails it had missed since being FUBAR'd which took about 10 minutes. Her email is through a university server, not through her ADSL provider.

Now her email is synch'd from LT, DT & phone. She's a happy camper!

BTW, I went to this site using FF without any ad blocking and was amazed at the pop-ups, mid-thread ads, etc. I've never seen that before! Has that always been the case? I never see any of that due to the way my system is config'd.
 
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