How to tell if system has a virus/malware

[Guest don]

Entire system is lagging BIG time.  Reboot, reboot router no change. Security scan

shows damaged archives in recycle bin.    

[Marcos 4,352]

You cannot know unless an antivirus detects malware. Even if the computer is sluggish, it may not be necessarily infected.

Does it take long to start applications, applications run slowly or what is actually the problem?

[peteyt 314]

If it is startup that is slow check what is loading at startup. Any non important stuff you can disable. MS things and AV should stay though.

Make sure in general you don't have unnecessary stuff running in the background and always avoid running more than one AV product as this can cause issues as the two try and do the same thing and also lead to crashes 

[shocked 59]

most malware that aim to damage your system won't just slow it down, they will change whatever they can to make their presence known.

for example, some could modify all your text, image, music, etc. files. change your wallpaper, system language and various other stuff.

a sluggish pc could also mean a dying hard drive, you can use a program to check it's health to rule out that possibility.

[Nightowl 164]

On 5/30/2021 at 4:41 PM, Guest don said:

Entire system is lagging BIG time.  Reboot, reboot router no change. Security scan

shows damaged archives in recycle bin.    

Damaged Archives can mean your hard drive is getting corrupted somehow

Also a good dust build up on your CPU Cooler can throttle down the system if it's getting too hot.

[itman 1,431]

19 minutes ago, Nightowl said:

Damaged Archives can mean your hard drive is getting corrupted somehow

Not necessarily.

I had a slew of these relating of Thunderbird e-mail old cache entries caused most likely by my own doing when I was having a past problem with Thunderbird. I simply deleted all those old cache entries and no corrupt archive files show in Eset's Scan log.