Wifi (logging/browsing) suddenly not working, Spybot did this?

You're very welcome. =)

(other TenForums users, you can also help reply assisting my good friend here on what he can do to have his old laptop run well.)

Important: You said you have an old laptop. I am assuming that the drive in this laptop is one of the old school ones, with spin-up discs. Here's the holdback about those, and Windows 10; Windows 10 is becoming designed to be used for SSD drives (I hope you understand what I mean by all this). SSDs can handle doing things so dramatically faster than the old-school disc drives. And Microsoft loves coming up with all types of random ideas and force your computer to run sooo much new stuff all the time. It will become difficult to always figuring out what's new that's been added to Windows 10, and to disable the new stuff...


So there's a few tools here and there, but before we go into 3rd party apps, we can use Windows itself to disable things first.


1) Go to Task Manager -> Startup tab

In here you can right click entries, and Disable them.


2) Task Scheduler. Search for, and open: Task Scheduler

a) On the left side, press: Task Scheduler Library
b) You're gonna find a bunch of stuff here. I don't use Microsoft Edge, so I disabled all entries that have to do with that. Do you have an Nvidia card installed? You might have some Nvidia entries here too. I disabled ALL Nvidia stuff. Useless software to have running with your computer in the background. Wastes memory for no reason.
IMPORTANT:

There's a LOT of stuff here:

But don't disable anything in here. Editing stuff in here could cause your computer to become unstable.

• Search for, and open: Services
There's many Microsoft stuff, yet like I said before, it will be difficult to figure out what you can disable and what you can't.
You can manually go through this list, and Disable 3rd party apps. Example:





Now to the 3rd party apps that can edit your computer's startup:
• There's a free app called CCleaner. It has a few things here and there that shows you what starts up with your computer.

Spybot is mence it creates thousands of entries in the host file which makes the net crawl check your host file and replace with blank default one

ScothMcBeast said:

Thanks, I'll look through these, though I've cut the taskmanager startup options already to AV and mousepad and that's it.
I switched an SSD in place like 2 years ago already to pump some life into this thing. It's a Pavilion 6g, bought 2012 if I recall... To put this in perspective, latest display adapter drivers I could find are 2015.

Oh okay that's good! An SSD in there is perfect.
Think about adding more RAM, but before that.. you can enable the Page File (many articles online, even on TenForums, that shows you how you can enable that.)
The Page File works similarly to RAM, and places that "RAM" space on your SSD. So a part of your SSD can work just like RAM. Think about this, and look at articles online that goes more in-depth on this. It would be a really good addition to your setup.
(What about the "damage" to the SSD with this "RAM"? No need to worry. Today's SSDs are very strong and you can write so much to them without worrying. I've had my main drive SSD for about 5 years, have Hibernate, and Page File enabled, and download such dramatic amounts of big files on a weekly basis... and CrystalDiskInfo says my SSD is at 91%. Don't look at the other 9% as something bad! It is NOT lost data! It's just those parts of the SSD Windows prefers not to really want to write data on, because of how much stress those parts of the SSD went through.)

So this is just an idea.

You can also upgrade the RAM if you want..

ScothMcBeast said:

That is interesting, I shall read about Page File and see if that might help to carry this old laptop until better financial times. Though I've got Magician working to keep that SSD little bit healthier, I guess I could sacrifice some for memory, if that indeed is something I can do and I understood correctly. I guess I should make sure there is enough space so the Magician can utilize the whole disk, not just parts of it. I've had about 20% of empty space, when it hits 10% I clear something I don't need anymore. But I can keep it 20% easily, it's 512Gb if I recall so there is some room :)

That's a lot of space. You can easily add a good Page File in there. Read articles online. But be careful with the research. I did a little research just now, but saw many pages that say the Page File isn't as preferred as having RAM instead... I got a little confused, then finally noticed... the articles were from the mid-2010s [smh]
Back in 2016, there were like no SSDs, or if there were any, they were brand new, very unreliable compared to today's SSD.
These articles are mostly referring to HDDs.
So do the good research. Many say let Windows automatically set the size of that file. Try that auto setting first, see how you like your computer's speed for like a few weeks. Then you can decide what you think.