Windows 10 Maintenance Programs Taking Too Long To Run

[rjlocal22]

Hello All,
I was advised earlier that I may have to format my hard drive and I may just do that. In January, I made the mistake of letting a scammer
control my computer and I think he may have installed something to mess up my maintenance programs.
The longest running program is Smart Defrag 6 Pro. I just turned it off as it showed that the time remaining to defrag is more then 2 hours.
This program was started the day before and I let it finish and it ran close to 2 hours or more.
My McAfee Live Safe virus program runs about 45 minutes to an hour.
I also run CCleaner and I also clean the Registry about once a week. This program only takes about a minute or less.
Years ago, my maintenance programs did not run as long as above but sometime in 2018, I noticed an increase in time to run the first two programs.
This is what got me perplexed. My hard drive contains 50 gb out of 914 available and the ram is 8192 mb.
So if you believe something is wrong with the time it takes or is it possible a malware installation that got passed my virus program?
If the scammer did if fact install malware, is it advisable to contact my internet provider and ask for a new IP address?

 

[Neemobeer]

Well I'm not sure why you'd pay or use something different than the built-in defrag program which works fine and if you have an SSD then you don't defrag them. As to McAfee I'd dump it and get something better like ESET, Bitdefender, Kaspersky, Webroot or Cylance.

It's very possible malware circumvented McAfee as it's not very good product.


To your last question, depending upon what they installed they could easily capture your IP no matter what it is, but if you want to change the IP just unplug your modem for 10+minutes and you should get a different address.

 

[rjlocal22]

Does that mean a scammer can still get your IP even after changing it?

 

[Neemobeer]

If they installed a RAT or other info gathering software, most definitely.

 

[rjlocal22]

• rjlocal22
  
• 19 minutes ago

Neemobeer, I checked the performance of "Iobits" defragger against windows optimization and defragger tool.
Windows won easily. At 3% fragmented, it only took 8 minutes to finish.
Iobits defragger appeared (and I suspect) to keep relocating files multiple times which I believe made it run longer.
So I removed it from my laptop and will use windows defragger from now on.