Sloooooow System

[MUZ]

Hello again everybody -

I have been having a time of it lately trying to figure out just what exactly has gone wrong with my system. Firstly the specs:

Mobo - Asus A7V8X-X
CPU - AMD Athlon XP 2000+
RAM - Kingston DDR400 1024Mb
Vid - Gigabyte Radeon 9200
HD - 1 x WD 200Gb, 1 x Maxtor 80Gb (mp3 only)
Sony DVD-Writer

After a spate of crashes, initially during a screensaver then becoming more regular 'freezes' during anything from wordprocessing, idle downloading overnight, using itunes, playing videos etc. my system has become remarkably slow. I fear that having to power down without shutting down windows properly may have caused some kind of damage to the OS.

After a defrag of all drives, chkdsk, virus / trojan scans, registry cleanup, my startup time either cold or hot has climbed into the 3 minute mark and once the system is up and running everything seems to be on a bit of a lag, kasperky antivirus seems to be a culprit in slowing things down (as per usual), but has become much more pronounced after the 'freezes', a virus-scan taking 3-4 times longer than usual. When I click on 'My Computer' now the little flashlight comes up for a few seconds.

I have cleaned all internal fans, reseated RAM and replaced cables, all to no avail.

I presumed this was a video card problem but can run relatively GPU intense apps (Unreal Tournament 2003 for eg) with no real lag once started.

Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Peddant]

I fear that having to power down without shutting down windows properly may have caused some kind of damage to the OS.

1.It`s unlikely to have caused permanent damage to the OS,
because XP is meant to be "self repairing".You could run
the system file checker I suppose - Start/Run/sfc /scannow.
I don`t think a damaged HD is too likely either.

2.Go into msconfig startup tab and uncheck everything.
If things run better after that,then you`ll know
that one of those caused the slowdown.

3.Try detaching pieces of hardware one by one.

4.The only time I ever had a serious slowdown
like that,it turned out to be loose cable on
a CD drive,which somehow brought everything else
down

5.Say you`ve tried all that,and the problem still persists.