- HELP - Unexplained Windows XP slowdown - ???

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rwnewson

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Hello. I'm trying to fix my friend's computer and I just have no idea what has gone wrong. She has a Celeron 1.3 GHz system with 128 MB RAM and 20 GB hard drive. I installed Windows XP on her computer 6 months ago. For the first 5 months, it ran great... no problems at all. But all of a sudden, it's slow as a turtle.

The only thing I can think of that has happened is that we moved into a new place with a new internet connection (cable received through a router) and we installed a new HP all-in-one printer. Now you can't do anything on it without waiting a heck of a long time. Just clicking the start menu takes 5 seconds to appear. Clicking internet explorer takes like 30 seconds... And sometimes the system freezes altogether.

The hard drive is not full, and does not need a defrag. It has all the windows updates (except it does NOT have any service packs) and Norton 2002 says there's no viruses. Any suggestions? THANKS!!
 
Open the Task Manager ( CTRL+SHIFT+ESC ), click on the process tab, sort by CPU usage & see what process is hogging the CPU.
 
It has to be something that was installed recently. Ask her what she has done. I know you said you just moved it and added the printer, but maybe she did something that you don't know about?
 
also check in device manager and make sure there are no yellow question marks or yellow triangles with exclamation points in them next to any devices.
 
Download Ad-Aware and run it as well. Also, how old is the hard drive itself? Do you see a lot of drive crunching during this slowdown?
 
Try disconnecting the cable router, check the speed, if no change remove printer and uninstall software check if its improved. You need to elimanate the changes one at a time to find the problem area or you will be looking all over :).

Ps Just check the pagefile settings have not changed, my setup had a bad habit of turning "let computer manage my resources"off and slowing the system down.
 
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