XP like molasses

sister-in-law has a windows xp home edition system that's now running extremely slow ... spybot is installed and up to date ... norton antivirus is installed and up to date ... and neither program has found any current threats (well, at least none that were not immediately dealt with, deleted and/or quarantined )

have also run the system defrag program without much notable improvement

when powering on, system can take up to 7 minutes to boot and then, when clicking programs to open, more minutes are spent waiting for them to load

sister-in-law is understandably a bit upset by this turn of events ... and she swears like a sailor so any thoughts the membership might have could conceivably save my life

btw, there are a couple gigs of wav files on her 20-gig system and less than half the 20-gig space is currently being used ... system is Pentium4 with 128 MB RAM

thanx

 

As a place to start.

I would suggest checking what is loading at bootup and shutdown everything possible.

Too many things loading a bootup may be loading up the RAM.

May even be some conflicts.

BillyBob

 

Why not just get a second opinion on the AV scan?
Housecall, online AV scan
If it passes, it would be something going on with XP.

 

I have seen this with Norton Antivirus and Norton Internet Security when a windows update changes certain Dll files.

The first thing to do is to MANUALLY run live update and see if there are any updates which the automatic updater is not fetching.

If this fails to solve the problem, try going into the options in NAV (or NIS) and disabling its launch with windows (Note there may also be an entry or two in services to disable. Go to start/ run and type services.msc and hit enter. Locate the norton entries and change them to disabled startup) and boot scans. Restart and see if things are better. If so, you may have to uninstall and reinstall norton .