trouble connecting to wifi on start up

[User Name missing]

My mother-in-law has a Dell laptop with win 7, running comodo, avast & adaware. Plus it has Intel My Wifi Technology.

The problem she is having with it is that after boot up, it can take a few minutes for the wifi to connect and then some web pages won’t work (ie yahoo email log on page won’t show, etc). I’ve scanned the PC with avast & adaware, both in and out of safe mode and removed everything that came up (which was quite a bit, 40+ problem items ranging from tracking cookies to trojans). I was having problems getting that damn My Wifi tech to be enabled on start up, without it, the net is sloooooow and/or non-functional. But I believe I got that fixed. Also after a fresh reboot, there can be over 100 processes running in task manager.

Any ideas???

 

[RonD]

Click on the START icon in lower left corner
Type: msconfig
in search window, then hit ENTER

You will get a new window
Click on the STARTUP tab
You will now see a list of all the programs that are starting up when computer boots up
Every time you add a program it will add itself to the startup list, so it can add up pretty fast, and all of a sudden it takes a lot longer to boot up computer, lol.

It is best to have another computer that you can use to look up what each program is on the list as you go through them.
But if you have a Dell computer with Intel and Windows then those programs should probably be left CHECKED, and uncheck the rest, then APPLY.

In the startup tab window you can slide Manufacturer/Command/Location widows wider and narrower to see all the data they contain.

When you remove a program from the automatic startup, uncheck it, it does not disable the program, it just doesn't startup and run in the background automatically.
For instance, if you uncheck Adobe PDF, it will not startup with computer, if you click on an abode PDF file to view it might take 1 second longer for that file to open since adobe was not running.

You will also see alot of automatic updates on the startup list, many programs install these so they can auto update, this means they are going on the internet when you first startup and then checking for updates while computer is running.
This doesn't slow things much but when added together.............well it adds up.
If you uncheck these the program they are used for will just ask you when it is started/used if you want to check for updates, so it doesn't disable updates it just becomes manual.

After you have unchecked what you want, then reboot computer, on startup you will get a popup that tells you startup has been changed, check mark "don't show me this again" and then OK.
If you make further changes to startup tab that popup will come up again, but it won't if you don't make any more changes.

How virus/trojans work is to load themselves into startup areas, so even if they are picked up by a scan and removed, when computer is shut off and restarted, they have rebuilt themselves.

There is a free software called Rkill, you can run it from windows but I prefer to run it from a USB stick.
What it does is to stop/kill programs running in the base registry, where these "rebuild viruses" hide, it doesn't remove them, just stops them from running.
Once you run Rkill only widows programs are running, then run Free Malwares bytes(with current lists), also on the USB stick, to remove any bad programs so they can not rebuild themselves after reboot.

 

[Mark_88]

When you run MSCONFIG make sure you click the box that says "Hide all Microsoft Services" before removing any checks...if that is still an option in newer versions...I know they have more options in the newer MSCONFIG windows but that should allow you to see all the non operating system services that are loading at startup.

Another thing...not sure about the newer versions of Avast...but the older versions used to actually cause issues with connectivity...I was a support tech for Bell years ago and 9 times out of 10 when a customer called we had to disable their AV and it usually got them connected without any problems.

I've used Zone Alarm for years and it usually works fine...although it has gotten more commercial for a free AV program...

If Avast is still freeware, I'd suggest looking into others (if that is the actual problem)...