Live.com running v e r y slowly

[SteveC]

My mother has a Hotmail account, set up by my late father about fifteen years ago.
I 'support' her computer remotely (she's in Southampton, I'm in Somerset) using Team Viewer.
She phoned today complaining that her email had 'frozen'. She uses the outlook.live.com service and, although it's running extremely slowly to the point of unusableness I don't think it's actually frozen.
I'm too tired tonight to do any more remote investigation, but does anyone have any suggestions?
Assume that I'm pretty competent (day job is software but not consumer facing stuff). We're an all Apple household so I don't get down and dirty with Windows these days.

Many thanks.

[Kim]

If it's webmail, first confirm it's working with her login details from some other computer (eg. your mac).

[SteveC]

Thanks, Kim. I knew I was tired tonight! That will be the first thing to try tomorrow.

[Afasoas]

This could be a symptom of:

• Windows Live Mail/Outlook/Whatever it's called today being cRaP
• Slow t'interweb connection
• Heavy weight browser with lots of tabs open and/or a stressed CPU ... Chrome for instance practically maxes out the CPU on my testbench's current trusty Core2Quad when it's used to view our trusty service monitoring web application, which uses client side scripts to render lots of graphs in real time

[SteveC]

If anything it's worse tonight.
It's not the hotmail website as I logged in to Mum's account from here.
About the only thing I've found is that there appear to be two versions of IE on there (at least they have different icons).
But both versions seem to have the same problem.
I couldn't find the task manager when connected, but I've found the key combination since.
Desperately frustrating.

[mrcharly-YHT]

Oh - that really sounds like malware.

I'd say almost impossible to sort out remotely.

Given the cost of travel to see your mum, check out if there is a (reputable) small computer shop near your mum. For the cost of travel, they might well do a malware clean up on her computer.

[SteveC]

Mother has just emailed to say her email is working again.

I shall assume for the time being that it was some sort of updating issue and there was a conflict which is no longer there.
I will also, when I get some time, do some checking out on her machine.

Thanks for the advice

[SteveC]

Thread resurrection.

Got home last night from a very tiring weekend to a voice mail from Mother. The email is still freezing. I was too tired to think of anything really useful then.
So I go back on tonight.
She's not wrong. Outlook.com is running very slowly, freezing, throwing problems so IE closes and reopens the tab in the background.
Other websites seem to be OK.

Any ideas? Win 8.1, fully up to date, McAfee reporting no issues....

[SteveC]

Have downloaded Chrome for her. That seems to have helped.