The last 2 weeks our laptop seems to have gone from Corvette to Chevette regarding speed. It takes almost 5 min just to boot and internet explorer is mega-slow. Have run AVG, Spybot and Adaware and came up with nothing. Defrag the harddrive a few times, deleted internet temp files, etc. Any suggestions on what to run next? Running XP.
A quick answer off the top of my head. It could be that the HDD may be bad or going bad. If you can watch the HDD activity light, is the HDD activity light "ON" during this period? It could be that the HDD controller or HDD I/O is retrying because of bad sector reads or bad cabling, etc.
Find out what's taking your resoures. Hit Ctrl-ALT-Detete to bring up your task manager. Sort by Mem Usage tab to get the highest program to the top. Look for program that shouldn't be running. Allot of programs open at startup you don't need all the time. Now this is your call what you think should be running. Next open up MSCONFIG and go to the startup Tab and uncheck any program you don't want. Be very carefull on what you turn off. Stay away from system programs. I always turn off tool bars but it's your call. Next try HijackThis to see if you have a Adaware program running. Again this is a very powerfull program so watch what you turn off.
If you have files that are corrupted on your drive, it will slow it down. You can try doing a chkdsk c: /f and see if that helps.
This may sound stupid, but I was caught out with this before. As it's a laptop, make sure that under your power settings, the CPU speed has not been lowered to medium or anything like that.
