slow Boot & jerky aud/vid with vaio(XP-SP2)

Hi,

My first post here, seen all the help that you guys provide...kudos to ya'll
I bought a sony - vaio vgn fs830/w around a month back
My laptops profile
Basic:
XP sp2
1.73Ghz pentium M
512 MB RAM 80G HDD

Complete:
http://rapidshare.de/files/16723031/profile.html.html

Everything was working fine until this week.
1. XP is taking > 5 - 6 minutes to boot (Even in safe mode).
2. Can't play even small audio video files....video is jerky ... sound crackles.
3. Overall performance is ok till I have azureus , limewire and AVG working..then things slow down a tad.
4.Also my physical mem (RAM) is 512 MB but in the task manager it shows around 200 MB (or something close to it) used and another 200 MB free when windows starts up.....the numbers dont add up.
5. Same with HDD 80G - 67.5( used + free) = 12.5 vanished ?

Rest everything works fine. Have uninstalled Noton (thought that was slowing down the machine) and installed AVG.

Used atleast 5 diff spyware tools (System mechanic , Ad-aware , spybot , trend etc)
All of them detected something but nothing major.

cleant the registry , set the bios to the default settings.

Scanned the HDD using norton AVG no viruses.

did a scandisk , defrag ...nada

monitored almost all the start up processes using winpatrol , auto-pilot , winaudit no suspicious processes.

have'nt installed any hardware or major softwares which would cause a problem.

did a system restore to a point where it was working....zilch.

I know there aint much to investigate further...need to diagnose if its a hardware issue. Another thing is that my machine is on for almost 2 - 3 days together ( no overheating though).

ANY HELP IS APPRECIATED.
I dont know for sure if this is a hardware related issue but have checked for most of the software issues that might be causing it . I wanna give it one last shot before I use my restore disk to reset everything to factory settings

Thanks
Amit

 

Bump...........

Anybody ?

 

taskman shows 200mb being used. is this as soon as windows loads?

 

yes...its weird cause I have nothing MAJOR besides AVG in the start-up

 

Got it.....I had tried 500 different things.....posted the same problem at techguy.com.....the moderator there suggested to uninstall the IDE ATA/Atapi driver...........and voila the boot time came down to about a minute...and the sound / video is just fine......dont wanna be judgemental here but I thought that was simply brilliant .... I am a comp engineer and i could've never imagined that was the problem. Anyways thanks for the help.

 

I have had a vaio fs600 for about 9 months now and have been dealing with the same boot up problem. It would take about 5 to 10 minutes before it settled down enough so that I could use it. It was like this out of the box and even after reformatting the hard drive twice.

I finally called sony tech (I put it off because I really didn't think they could help) and they told me to delete SpySubtract from the startup folder so it's not running in the background and also to remove the trial version of Norton internet sec. I removed the SpySubtract icon and that alone fixed the problem!

I don't know if this will work for anyone else but mine boots like a champ now! (about a minute and a half) Can't belive I put up with for that long.

 

norton is a piece of crap....get AVG...and abt that spysubtract ..dont see it ...

 

yea, norton just came as part of the package-- if you don't have that spysubtract thing then I don't know what to say. I removed it from the start-up and that did the trick.