PC on major slowdown, can you help please?

Question

My pc specs are:

Fujitsu Siemens
AMD Sempron Processor 3000+
994 MHz, 400mb of RAM
149Gb Hard Drive
Windows XP Home Edition SP2

The slowdown has been happening for a few months now and getting worse, I thought it was because I had alot of movies saved onto my HD but I cleared them all off, got rid of any programmes and documents I haven't been using, did a disc clean up and defragmented the HD. I've run a full system scan for viruses and malware and the like but my pc is clean.

The slowness continues and my CPU usage keeps going to 100% for no visibly apparent reason, what could be wrong?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Too much crap runnin in the background would be the next place to look!

Answer 2

This is likely to be Spyware, Adware, and Malware. When your CPU is showing 100% it means, basically that you have been hacked into. Sorry, but not all "scans" are effective at detecting malware, and it sounds like your scan was ineffective.
You have two choices:
1. Reformat and reload your operating System.
This is a pretty good choice considering Systems Engineer School recommends reloading the operating system every 6-12 months for best performance.
2. Since that is XP, you can disable a few of the programs (processes) by using msconfig, a utility built in to XP. To do this type "msconfig" without the quotes in the run box and hit enter. Next, go to the startup tab, and uncheck any box of any program or process that you are not using. Note that this wont affect your performance at all until you reboot, when those unchecked boxes will not start at next boot.
To verify you have spyware, right click your taskbar and select Task Manager. At the bottom of the "process" tab, it will tell you how many processes are running. If you have 30 or less processes you probably do not have spyware. If you have 50 or more you probably do have spyware. In between, with 31-49 processes running you still may have spyware, or you may just be trying to run too many programs at once.

Answer 3

I recommend you do the following things:

1) Check computer for spyware/adware - use free tools such as Ad Aware or AVG.

2) Check computer for viruses - free tools such as AVG anti virus, or do a free online scan at Trend Micro Housecall

3) Download CCleaner, and run that, it will remove unneccesary files, and remove non existent registry entries.

4) Defragment your hard drive aswell, as you said you had alot of movies, defragmenting your hard drive will be a good option. Use either the Windows built in one, or download a trial version of diskeeper.

5) You may want to uninstall programs you dont use, and check the services that start up and remove those that dont need starting up. This can be done via CCleaner aswell.

6) If all else fails and your computer is still slow, reformat harddrive.

It does sound like a long process. But its worth doing to keep your computer in good shape.

Answer 4

run taskmanager (run taskmgr) go to the processes tab and click x2 on CPU, the top process should be the process using most of your CPU cycles.

if there is little there you can get rid of, AND your harddisk light is still blinking a lot you may have to get more memory, 400 meg sounds okay, but 1 gig is better.

Answer 5

Try a little free program called CCleaner it gets rid of all the hidden junk on your comp. just google for it. i use it all the time and never get slow downs even when my hardrive is nearly full. and i havn't defragged in 2.5 yrs

Answer 6

look at your startup programmes..first..something in that is slowing it down..next..save all your programs to disc..run a diagnostics check.. if this hasn't cleared the problem .re-boot from pc disc..to bring the pc back to its original state..or if you have it in the system take the pc back to a previous date on the system recovery..