Need Help With A Dead Slow Windows Xp Laptop

Hello,
Just a couple of days ago, a T43 Thinkpad with Win XP became really slow. Before that it was working with no problem, but after putting a movie on netflix it became jumpy. I tried to close and open the browser (Chrome) but the computer froze. Since I couldn't do anything else, I shut down the laptop by pressing the power button a couple of seconds and then restarting it. It didn't work right since it constantly froze upon starting, sometimes before the welcome screen others on the windows loading screen.

Today it managed to load to the main screen. It was still really slow, preety much frozen, but the mouse moves like 3 to 5 minutes after I moved it. After some time I managed to open CCleaner and run it (the laptop worked ok for about a minute here). I thought that that would free some RAM but it hasn't helped. Right now Im waiting for it to run Malwarebytes just to try something else.

So my main questions are, does anybody know what could be the cause of this? And what procedures can I use to make the laptop work again? I also don't see the harddrive light blink as much when the laptop is on, I dont think is something physical since we havent moved it in a couple of weeks from it current location.

Thanks in advance for any information.

 

Jiroben...

Start with this:

My Computer->Right click main drive and select Properties->Tools tab->Error Checking (Check now)->Place a check in both boxes and press start->select yes at the prompt about chkdsk running on boot->reboot and wait for chkdsk to finish...

 

Also, have you tried booting into safe mode? Is it okay or the same lag in safe mode?

 

Do as AtlBo suggests about chkdsk. But, I'm also thinking that since it's a T43 with XP you only have a 40 — 60GB hard drive. Even though you were in Netflix, whichever movie you were watching was "buffered" (downloaded) and it's still on the hard drive taking up a lot of space. If you don't have at least 25% free space on your hard drive, you'll end up with the type of problems you're describing and eventually the hard drive could fail. Copy/move as much as you can of your data from the internal drive to an external one.