I was handed a laptop the other day which was assumed to have been infected with some horrible trojans,rootkits,and/or viruses. As I am always curious about these kind of things I decided to take the time and have a look to see

#1 what was going on and

#2 if I could get it cleaned up.

The First thing I did was to grab my trusted malwarebytes.org latetest version of Anti-Malware – it’s been able to bring back a couple of machines for me in the past so I decided to run it and it came back — clean.

The owner is fastidiously careful with their surfing habits and as such there weren’t any problems that I was able to find with an initial scan. however going through the motions that I do I noticed that the disk was highly fragmented. Nothing new there a few passes with defrag and things will be back to a decent speed.

NOTE: this system was running NTFS but I had found that the disk system was performing horribly when I moved a large archive from the system partition to the recovery partition. so slow in fact that I assumed that the hard drive might be failing. S.M.A.R.T did not show any warning so I started to look into the file system.

I let Defrag run overnight and there was not a bit of an improvement. I opened up the report and found an interesting entry in the description of the MFT. it had over 50 fragments! Now Had this been a Vista or Windows 7 Machine this problem would not be a technical issue, However, With XP it is.

I found a few programs that could solve this issue and I am happy to report that once the MFT fragmentation was cleared up the computer booted up in about 90 seconds. compared to the greater than 10 minutes or longer prior to the fix being implemented.

So it might nit be a virus or a failing drive or a full registry after all. Check to see if your MFT is fragmented and you might be able to get back some performance you lost on your XP machine.

Or you could just upgrade to Windows 7 and have to reinstall all your Applications and hope your hardware has signed drivers. I’m guessing that the Defrag is the less painful option for most of you.

Let me know if this helped you out at all in the comments section.

Bookmark: