My computer has been moving quite slow lately and im just asking to see what may be the problem. I have 320gb hd, pentium 4 3ghz processor, 512mb Ram, windows xp, and an ati 9250 radeon graphics card. Also some times my xp bar at the bottom will turn into the old school windows bar for some weird reason.
First thing to check is your running processes (in windows task manager), see if there is anything eating up the CPU or the memory. Like marsey99 said, it could be a virus, but it can be something else like a software that you may have installed that is running, like an antivirus program automatically scanning your computer. Also you should look at the Hard Drive Activity LED on the case of your computer, if you are not running any application then its not supposed to be on constantly unless you have just started up. If it is on or blinking a lot when you are not doing anything, then something is running in the background. Also try running a spyware removal program and see what that comes up with Additionally, try defragmenting your hard drive Hope that helps
ok i did all that stuff and i checked task manager which say that svchost.exe uses 53,300k of memory and the system idle process uses 99 cpu but there both system processes so i dont think i can end them and those are really the only ones that eat up alot of cpu and memory
what makes me think its a virus is the taskbar changing back to classic mode. those process's seem right, you could try google with all the others to see if there is anything nasty in there.
I had a problem with one of my scvhost.exe's the big one it kept playing up every now and then it ate about 45% of 2gb of ram and 90% of my 3.4ghz P4. so i found out the way to stop it was to disable Automatic Updates and just update yourself the way to do this is to go run type in Services.msc and a screen will come up find Auto Update double click select manual and click disable it fixed it but now when i update i have to check my self. You should try it. But it also could be a virus scanning your drive wouldnt hurt would it?