Slow Slow SLow. My System is dragging its heels.

My system has slowed dramatically from what it was. When I used to boot up things were instant. Now it takes a few seconds after boot up for all the screen icons to come up properly. It takes about 20 seconds before anything is usable. Feels like the computer is doing other things. Plus when avg is doing its daily scan the computer is really slow. Its also the same when I try to do 2 or more things at once. For example if im writing a film to dvd using nero I find it difficult to surf or use other applications. My pc used to handle anything but now doesnt. What has gone wrong ??

I have intel pentium 4 3ghz with 704 ram. the motherboard Is a bit of a cheapy .

Think its an asrock but I never had problems before.

 

Hello Delboy,

You can start by checking on what's running on your system:

http://www.windowsbbs.com/showthread.php?t=39425 check your running processes and startups against the data bases linked to in the post.

http://www.windowsbbs.com/showthread.php?t=31535
You may have been infected with malware, follow the steps to use the scanners linked to in that thread, such as Ad-Aware, Spybot and trojan scanners such as Ewido.

Regards - Charles

 

Do a basic checkup first - chkdsk /f, defragmentation, clean registry, check for spyware/malware. If you hear any unusual sounds from your computer, your hard disk may be going south.

 

i find it hard to believe that 20 seconds is an excruciating amount of time to wait. next, why do you feel the need to do a daily scan for virus's with avg, or any other anti virus program for that matter...?? 704MB's of ram may be good enough (and usually is) but maybe you need to max out your motherboards ram capacity? you may be using too many programs, sapping up all the available ram.