slow system all of a sudden

Hi everyone.

I have a thinkpad running XP pro. Suddenly, yesterday, the operating system became painfully slow. I have to wait every time I want to open a folder, program, etc....in some cases it just freezes. But in the next minute, the system might suddenly be back to normal.

I defragmented the hard drive, ran virus scan (avast), malware, spybot, cccleaner...and found nothing.

Help!

campguy

 

Check your CPU when it is lagging, if there is alot of lagging going on due to CPU then check your process and see whats using up all that juice.

 

Hi campguy, have a look at what is running at start up....

Go to run and type "msconfig" and hit enter, then go to the "start up" tab, and it will show you all the prog's that are running at boot up

Let us know whats there

Q

 

Check the properties of your IDE controllers in Device Manager, they should all be set for DMA mode, if Windows detects recurrent errors on a drive, it can slow the transfer speed until it crawls.

 

Thanks for all of your responses...

I was looking at the IDE controllers in device manager, but I don't know what DMA mode means.

I do have a lot of stuff running at start up and in processes. I don't know what half of it is and how to get rid of it. Is there a thread here that explains how to optimize all of that?

Thanks

 

Left click to open the IDE controllers. Right click on the listings open properties and and check tate DMA is enabled.

As Q mentioned, we need to know whats running in msconfig start up tab. Please list all.

Also check for any process that may be hogging the CPU in task manager when the comp is acting buggy.

Cheers..

 

The computer I originally started this thread about is now working perfectly...but my other computer isn't, gets slow and sounds like the hard drive is running constantly. Here is the start up list. (attached)

thanks for your help

 

i guess i can't attach XLS files. Here it is in txt

 

i'm trying to attach the file