My computer is torturing me, maybe you can help

[Darshana]

The thing it's doing, my last 5 year old computer also started doing similar things when it got old.

Here is the torture: every night starting at about 7:30-8, it becomes slower and slower, stickier and sticker.  I often have to turn it off just to get it to close everything down as it won't even do that. 

If my antivirus etc program is scanning at this time, it will not admit as much.

For now I just changed my time-date setting, just to say it's 3:42 am instead of pm.  I don't know if the computer's clock is "scheduling" these events, or if it's something else, but that's all I could think of to do, make computer think that 8 am is 8 pm, as I'm never in this office in the morning so I don't care how crazy the thing goes at that time.

My computer probably needs to be replaced, it is a Dell and it is at least 5 years old so I don't know if I want to pay Computer Guy to come here and do something to it, but I might have to if I can't afford a good new computer - everyone I know has switched to a Mac so I suppose I should too.

[Dil Bert]

Here is the torture: every night starting at about 7:30-8, it becomes slower and slower, stickier and sticker.  I often have to turn it off just to get it to close everything down as it won't even do that. [...]
For now I just changed my time-date setting, just to say it's 3:42 am instead of pm.

Did that improve matters?  If so, it could be you have some maintenance tasks scheduled for that time.  You could look up your particular version of anti virus and Windows and see how to check for scheduled tasks.  It could also be some malware using your computer, but since you've been running antivirus, let's hope not. 

Do you know if you're running a firewall?  Installing MS's free security products is a good start: http://www.microsoft.com/security/default.aspx

Do you run a lot of web applications?  It's possible your residential network gets much busier during the evenings, but it doesn't sound like that's exactly what's happening.

You say you often have to turn it off; by that do you mean you cut the power to it before the operating system has shut down?  That's bad to do to computers.

I think the first step is to make a complete backup.  If you don't already have a way to do so, get a USB hard drive big enough to hold your entire system and some software such as Acronis True Image (which is what I use on my PC).  Carefully follow the instructions.

The instructions for the following can be googled:
Once you have a backup, you can try installing all updates from Dell and Microsoft and your anti virus software maker (this all can take a while).  Then disconnect the computer from the network and run a full virus scan.  If that doesn't turn up anything, then run a full defragmentation of the hard drives.  You can then connect to the Internet and try to update all your other software (browsers, etc.).  If that doesn't fix anything, since you have a full backup, you could then try removing software which you installed but no longer use (be sure to properly reboot each time so each software package can remove all of its files).

If none of the above fixes the problem, it's probably time for something new.  Macs are expensive to buy and own (ask me, I have two) and can become slower over time as well.

[Darshana]

Thanks!!  I'll see if I can follow your advice, or get some help with it.

As to question, yes, I sometimes just turn the whole thing off before anything has shut down, I do this only when the whole thing just gets stuck and there is nothing at all that can be done about it, it just stays like that indefinitely.

I'll see if I can find out about scheduled tasks.  Form my antivirus I couldn't tell anything about when things were scheduled.  Past a point though I also don't know how to look for this stuff.

[Dil Bert]

On that MS page I linked to, there's also a link to software to detect/remove malware: http://www.microsoft.com/security/scanner/en-us/default.aspx

To find out about scheduled tasks, you can try googling "antivirus name schedule scan" or the like.

Best of luck!