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

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.
If there are some really good tools that you would like to suggest please go ahead. I wanna give it one last shot before I use my restore disk to reset everything to factory settings

Thanks
Amit

 

Bump.....

Anybody ???

 

'sup dude. make sure your startup and services are clean and optimized, check out black viper's tips: http://www.majorgeeks.com/page.php?id=12 takes a while, but definitely worth it. 5-6 mins, wow thats a long time to boot......if you cant fix things yourself id back up all the files you need/want to keep onto cds, dvds, or another hdd, and reformat. Just be more careful next time around, ive managed to keep this install of windows running relative unchanged since reformatting it; practice makes perfect, try things out and see what works. Ok, kinda wwandered off topic but ive said all i pretty much know....good luck man.

 

First thing I would do is close down everything non windows in startup except for an Av program and a firewall. Next get hold of Crapcleaner (its free available here at MG) install and run it. You may find that is the answer to your problems
Cheers
Robert

 

@viper_boy403 thanks for the link but my startup programs was the first thing I had cleant.

@Robert: Have'nt tried the software yet ... will do so tonite.

My main problem is the jerky video and crackling audio....even the windows logon music has a cracking sound. It could be either due to hardware failure or it could be a symptom of some other problem .... the slow boot-up might imply the latter but am not sure ....any tool for diagnosing hardware problems ?

 

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.