PC slowly slowly dying, help....

Hi,

my pc has become very sluggish. I have a 500mhz, 384mb ram, win xp (not updated in years) and an 80gb hard drive. Now i only have about 2gb free at any one time, and i run quite a few processes. And i havent formated for over three years, and have many things from 3 years back. I know i should have alot more free space and i should update and i should only run a few processes but i need them all, and they worked fine till 5-6months back where it became slow, so even with the all the data and processes the pc worked fine and now its become sluggish again.

Ive tried getting rid of some stuff from my HDD, ive run the pc on the least amount of processes, and yet it still is stuttering, like every 3-4 seconds the pc stammers for a moment and back to normal, this happens every 3-4 seconds. This then effects music playing since, every 3-4 seconds theres a stutter and the music gets blurred for that moment. Ive run Spyware blaster, Spybot S&D, bitdefender, spyware doctor, adaware, registry mechanic, AVG antivirus (free and Pro), gotten rid of the .pif files, and i use sygate firewall.

i initially thought the hard drive messed up, but then the problem was solved without having done anything, and the problems back.

 

For decent operation a harddrive likes to have 20% free space,16gigs in your case,have you defragged the drive lately?,remove as much crud as you can before you defrag,set your swap files min and max to 1.5 gigs,theres no magic pill here you either have to get rid of some stuff or buy a dvd burner or harddrive and back it up

 

Thing is ive always had this much data on my hard drive and i didnt use to have any issues.

What you mean by 'remove as much crud'? and 'set your swap files min and max 1.5 gigs'?

Defragging, aint done that in years either.

 

crud,crap,poo stuff you can live without it may be hard but you will HAVE to if you want to improve the performance of the drive,go to control panel,system,advanced,performance,settings,advanced,virtual memory,change,custom settings,set min and max to 1500mb to stop the harddrive keep changing the page file size.

If you have been using the internet without an updated copy of windows,theres an extremely good chance you will have been infected with spyware,adware and trojans,nighty,night.

P.S I'll reiterate,DEEEEFFFFFFRAAAGGGGG lol

 

Ok gotya, but ive been using firefox and as i mentioned before ive run Spyware blaster, Spybot S&D, bitdefender, spyware doctor, adaware, registry mechanic, AVG antivirus (free and Pro), gotten rid of the .pif files, and i use sygate firewall.

So im quite safe, but ill try the defrag thing.