OS lag problem

[N-Guy]

Lately my OS has been a bit... buggy. Sometimes when I'm watching a movie or something, the video feed is very choppy & when I check the task manager, my CPU usage is quite high. After a bit it goes down & my video feed is fine. But about 6 hours later while I'm playing Maple Story, listening to winamp, browsing through some forums & on MSN - my PC begins to lag quite bad. No webpages will continue to load or refresh, my MSN freezes up & I can't even click on my start bar or open up task manager.

My specs:

Win XP Service Pack 2
Intel P4 2.60ghz 800FSB
4x 512mb DDR400

I don't think anything else matters.

Both AVG & AVAST antivirus softwares have detected nothing. I haven't seen anything suspicious or even new on Hijackthis. And Ad-Aware just picks up the same cookie tracker things over & over again.

Does anyone have a clue to what could be causing this?

Thanks to anyone that can help ^^, I already had to reboot my comp twice today because of this problem.

 

[Rik]

Get speedfan from the download section and monitor your temperatures with it for a while.

 

[N-Guy]

I already have speedfan, and I highly doubt it's a temperature problem. I cleaned all my fans & added new ones about 2 - 3 weeks ago.
My temp currently ranges from 30 - 40 *C, considering that it's getting near summer & the weather's been pretty warm these past couple days, that should be normal. Hell, last summer my PC was at about 43 *C and ran perfectly fine. Right now it's 33 *C.

 

[Rik]

Fault finding is usually a process of elimination, please list all the things you have checked and tried.
The further we can narrow things down, the closer we will get to the cause.

 

[N-Guy]

Hmm I pretty much listed everything I tried in the first post, except for ruling out the temperature which came in my second...

I haven't installed any additional software or hardware recently when the lag/freezing began happening...

EDIT:

Just analyzed my C: with the window's "Disk Defragmenter", and it said I should defrag - there appears to be a lot of fragmented files.

Think a defrag would help? I have O&O Defrag - so I'll run that if it's a good idea.

 

[howard_hopkinso]

If your hard drive is heavily fragmented, then that would account for the sluggishness of your system. Run a defrag immediately, in fact run it twice.

You should see an impovement in your systems speed.

I`m not saying this is your only problem, but it sure should help.

Regards Howard

 

[Rik]

NIce one Howard, i was just about to say that.
I will just add run scandisk too.

 

[N-Guy]

Ok thanks guys, that problem seemed to have stopped now. I defragged over night, and haven't had that problem all day. But, I got a new one now. My keyboard's lights keeps going on & off so sometimes I can type & sometimes I can't...

 

[howard_hopkinso]

Just to rule out a possible keyboard problem, try another keyboard.

Let us know how it goes.

Regards Howard

 

[N-Guy]

https://www.techspot.com/vb/topic50634.html

Started another thread for it - all in all, I got a new keyboard .

 

[N-Guy]

Damn it's happening again, my start bar has completely froze, I can't get the start menu or task manager to come up. The only things that are still working is anything I left open like MSN & Firefox.

Someone please help

I just defragged my harddrive again last night, and a virus scan & spyware scan during the day yesterday...

EDIT:

Also, when my computer boots up now not all icons fully load like this:
http://s94836709.onlinehome.us/unloadedicons.jpg

But if I click on the icons, they work perfectly fine =\

 

[N-Guy]

Someone really - please help. It just happened again >_<

 

[DelJo63]

get cports http://www.nirsoft.com to monitor TCP traffic
if you click on the column heading Local Address, (sort down, not up) it will keep connections on
your system at the top so as to inform you what's going on.

disable ALL auto-updates, MS update, AV update(s)
{I prefer manual invocation so I know/understand who/what/when it all occurs}

imo, I can't even click on my start bar or open up task manager is the major symptom here
and it implications hardware as you've been struggling with already.