Try this first though. Try an online virus and spyware scanner called Housecall. Available for free at: http://www.trendmicro.com/housecall They’ll try to sell you stuff there, but ignore it and keep clicking where it says ‘free scan’. You will be allowed to scan your computer free as much as you want. As long as this scanner will actually run on your computer, it should fix it. Now the viruses may have locked you up so bad you can’t run this scanner… I’ve seen that happen. But give this a try before you wipe out everything.

Ok… another option to try is inside windows setup, you can try restoring all defaults. Depending on the version of Windows you’re using this is likely in one of several different areas. I had to poke and probe around in Windows XP to find it. Do a websearch of windows xp restore defaults Hopefully you’ll find an easy way to do this.

Doing one or both of those will not wipe out your files, however, restoring windows defaults will restore any windows preferences you’ve set up. But it could be one or more of those preferences that is slowing down your pc. Just be careful when you reset things back up and watch for something that seems to slow something down. If you ever run across something that puts a special toolbar on your browser such as "easywebsearch"… stay away from that, its bad news.

Now if you do need to restore such as a factory restore, that usually means reformatting the entire hard drive and using a special restore CD to get things back. That will get rid of most everything, but some really nasty hard ones can still survive this. They survive this by remaining on the boot sector of the hard drive, so when you turn on your computer to restore, it loads in memory than immediately re-writes itself back to the hard drive the moment you reformat. So you shut down again to start installing everything back and boom it loads itself back into memory and you didn’t clear it. However, I believe Housecall gets rid of boot sector viruses as well letting you know that anything might be in computer RAM memory.

Now ideally it would be nice if you had a very clean machine (clean of viruses and spyware) that you could scan any CDs you make of backup files from your infected PC. Make backup CDs of anything you want saved with the infected CD… then scan them with a clean PC before you try to read anything just to make sure you haven’t carried anything off of that machine onto your backups. If your backups do have viruses you’ll need a pro to make sure you can get the data off of there safely without infecting a future computer. This is especially important if you do have one of those nasty boot sector viruses because anything you write to a disk or CD they’re going right after the boot sector and making sure they survive.

This nasty stuff and it’s a challenge to get rid of sometimes.

Someone said is it XP or 2K3. If you have Windows Professional Server 2003, you’d know it. You likely have Windows XP. Don’t worry. Dell is a pretty serious computer company. I don’t think they call any of their servers "dimension", I believe the Dell Dimension line is personal home computers.

if you mean a system reboot the whole hard drive is wiped clean and then windows will be reinstalled, you will have no personal files on it and no spyware or other viruses. its like having your PC from brand new

XD hope this helps.