My Laptop Is Runing Very Slow

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Good Morning,

Can anybody help me? My laptop has decided to run very slow,when I have finished on the web and I click the close button the page slowly closes like in strips down the screen and when I turn off the laptop it takes ages and it shows a grey box with programs like norton shutting down but it says it can't shut because it timed out and I have to push end now button before the program and the laptop shuts down completely!

Any ideas????

Regards
Chris

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

whats your spec on your computer and what progs do you have running? have you checked for viruses and adware?

 

Its a xp home with updates, I run nod32 antivirus nero7, spy sweeper which has just been updated ( that may be causing it?) windows defender, itunes. none of the checkers have brought any problems to light!
do you think I should go back to a restore point??

Regards
Chris

 

Sounds like you are running out of memory to me Chris. Since SP2 came out i would say you need 512 as a minimum.

Si

 

true, whats your hardware specs???

What have you installed recently?

 

it is 512 Ram, the only things I have installed are some windows updates and spysweeper has been updated to a new version.


Regards

Chris

 

Start with the obvious then, take spysweeper off and see if it improves, if it does re install it and see again.

 

The first place I would start in trying to figure this out is by taking a look at the task manager to see what process/es is/are using all the cpu power and memory.

 

Its all well having 512mb RAM, If you have a download agent i.e Limewire. These can take up a big amount of memory.
Try closing down applications that you are not using, see if that makes a difference.

You have not decided to try your luck at deleting files you shouldnt have??

 

Another you could try, go into youre BIOS settings and load optimised defaults.

 

I personally think XP needs as much memory you can throw at it. For my test domain, i have XP clients without SP2 and no Anti-virus and it flies. By the time you stick SP2, AV, firewall, spyware protection and other utilities (that should be part of the OS in my opinion on ) it doesn't half slow the machine down.

Just my 2p

Si

 

There could be loads of reasons for this problem. I would check what is starting uo when you boot windows. run an msconfig command and check under the startup tab. Maybe something has slipped through the net and is booting with windows. I recently had a couple of spyware and malware progs which made it past symantec and Apple shampoo antispyware and the machine became so slow. Check to make sure everything tha is in the startup tab requires preloading, and if required deselect anything you dont want at boot time. Also as ffreeloader said, check task manager for processes running using excessive cpu or ram, best to do this when the system is relatively idle so you can see what is fluctuating.

Other things to consider, check your drivers. Maybe your gfx driver has corrupted, hence the jerking graphics. Also check that windows is seeing all your ram, and if possible run a burn in test on your ram to make sure you dont have a corrupted memory stick.

Lastly check the size of your pagefile. I know some people (myself included) like to set a fixed size page file, whilst others like windows to take care of the paging. Its all preference, but I have seen some machines slow right down due to inssuficient hard drive space for the swap file. As an indicator, my system is now idle, the cpu usage is 0% im using 300mb of my 1gb of ram, and 800mb of the pagefile. My pagefile has its own partition so I know i can never run out of paging space.

Hope this helps, tried my best with what info I had.

Jodsclass

 

What is this Norton program that is not responding?

Uninstall that and see how you go. IMHO all Norton applications are resource hogs these days and are responsible for grinding many a PC to a halt

 

deepdale11,

How much free space do you have on your hard drive?

 

have u tried restoring it to a previous state, it helps sometimes...

 

try restoring it to a date prior to when the problem occured...

 

try turning off system restore as this can slow your machine down aswell then do a defrag

also type msconfig at the run prompt and stop any programs from running at startup that arent really needed

 

There's a free program called Startup Inspector for Windows that tells you all the programs that run when Windows starts and also tells you how vital to the running of the system they are. I've found it really helps to cut down on bloat, and it may show up a few pieces of malware too.