ok so I guess this is the best place to ask. I cant for the life of me figure out why my computer is running so slow. Ive run just about every free virus scan and antispyware program I can find and it is still slow as balls. I would rather not spend any money to fix the problem because im pretty sure there is a free program available that can help me out. If I open up task manager the CPU is constantly jumping from about 8-10 up to 45-50% capacity or whatever. Looking at he list of running processes this activity is coming from the System Idle Process... Im no expert on this crap so I really dont know what that means, but I do know it aint supposed to be like that. Any help would be appreciated.
There exists malware/spyware so nasty that it subverts all but the best of the scanners. You speed is vanishing in some combination of the following places:
- Bloat ... you have too much running
- Fragmentation to the hard drive
- Fragmentation to the registry
- Memory leaks from poorly written software
- "hidden" activity from virus/spyware/malware
What are the machine specs? XP should have absolutely bare minimum 512 MB of RAM... it needs a good 1 GB to start speeding up... and 2 GB is even worthwhile.
If you really cared about speed at a free price....
Im running XP
AMD Sempron 3000+
512 MB RAM
Ill try running defrag I havent done that yet.
Reinstall XP or get Linux.
Virtually everybody I know that uses XP alot reinstalls the damn thing like once a year to clean up all the accumulated bloat, crud, and fragmentation.
poopy ill just deal as long as I can.
