really slow computer

[needhelpz]

well i have had my computer for 3 months now and my system decided to take a turn for the worse and go really slow,it hasnt got a virus i scanned nothing,no trojans,i cant open up anything ,etc..i cant open up more than 2 programs at once like win media player,and a game like quake2, i have a feeling my memory is screwed in the registy , not too sure,and further when im using paintshop pro, and im moving an object, it uses 100% memory! and a few months ago only 10% at most of my memory any suggestions? heres my machine

amd athlon 1800xp
geforce2 titanium tv out
60gb segate 7600prm hard drive
256drr memory
windows xp home

if u people cant help me on this one ,would a system restore help? and would this clean up any things that could have been changed due to someone messing it up,i was first thinking i could have been hacked but dunno and suggestions would be great

 

[Justin]

Hmm... not uncommon, although the cause could be many things.


Have you ensured that all the latest XP patches are installed, including service pack 1? I know XP's flavor of explorer was notorious for having memory leaks and bugs that would cause a constant 99-100% cpu load. Check your task manager process list for CPU time and memory usage.

Also, check for conflicts. Have you recently added or changed hardware? Just because two or more devices may get along doesn't mean they get along well.

A reinstall may be in your future but there are many far less painless avenues to persue before... including Recovery before reinstall, that may solve it without having to do a complete reinstall.




Side note... doesn't this belong more in the Windows forum?

 

[StormBringer]

What is your pagefile settings? Have you disabled it maybe? That would cause you to use much more RAM and with only 256MB it is not recommended. Have you changed anything in the registry that would affect memory usage and allocation? What about the services that are running? What about % of fragmentation? A good defrag may be in order. A drive that is heavily fragmented will be much slower and takes a lot of time to find files. If you do a lot of work that modifies and moves files around the drive will become more fragged more quickly. Partitions can reduce this by isolating the fragmentation to the partitions that are heavily used.
I wouldn't be too fast to format and reinstall, find the problem and fix it, then you'll know what it is if it happens again.