Backup

Recently, my computer must have aquired some virus. For the past couple weeks, I have encountered numerous crashes, lag, and other problems. One big problem is that something is wrong with the Anti-Virus program on my computer. After uninstalling and reinstalling several times, I can't get it to work. I even downloaded a trial version of the other major anti-virus off the internet, and that didn't work. There's an obvious problem, but unfortunately, I couldn't dp much about it cuz of lack of virus scan software. Another problem my computer was having was that very often when I encountered a popup add, my computer would crash. This problem only got worse, but soon I found a program called "AdsOff" which blocks practically all banner and popup adds (addsoff.com). This did make the problem much better, and I recomend it to everyone because then you won't have to encounter annoying popup adds anymore.

Anyway, my mom finally had enough, so now I'm backing up all the important stuff on the computer, such as documents, music, and game files, onto CDR's. After I finish this task, we're gonna have to "restart" the computer to how it was when we first got it. I just hope I don't forget to backup any important files. I also hope I don't end up including some infected file on these backup discs. Oh well.

Good luck!

You say it might be a virus, might it not be a bacteria? (Hardware bugs)

Did you run a scandisk?

After that, try a defrag. It might be locking up because it has to find everything on the HD in different places, or bad sectors.