Its sick

[aslowjoe]

My computer is really dragging. I have a pentium 4 with 512mb of memory very sufficent free disk space. 3 different spyware programs. I have a new dell 20.1 monitor but that is the only thing that has changed and might have coincided with the slow down, slow video card? I cant find my orginal windows disk so I cant do a reinstall.
Any ideas?
Any ideas

What particular things are slow? Launching applications? Dragging windows around? Web browsing? Did the slow down come immediately after switching to the new monitor? Have you tried temporarily switched back to the old one? Yes, if you have a really cheap video card then it could be responsible.

Get rid of all of your spyware programs except lavasoft adaware or microsoft antispyware beta. Some of the others ones actually INSTALL spyware (tricky, eh?).

Are you running XP? Right click on the taskbar and choose Task Manager. Click on the performance tab. Look at the "MEM Usage" and tell me how much ram you're using. You should look at this value immediately after bootup, and after you've been using the computer for a while.

Run defrag.

After you report back I'll tell you a few more things to do.

[aslowjoe]

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Right click on the taskbar and choose Task Manager. Click on the performance tab

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I do not see where the performance tab is.

if a open any procedure computer usage spikes to nearly 100%

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Launching applications? Dragging windows around? Web browsing

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All of the above.
Get rid of all of your spyware programs except lavasoft adaware or microsoft antispyware beta. Some of the others ones actually INSTALL spyware (tricky, eh?).

done [ QUOTE ]


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Did the slow down come immediately after switching to the new monitor? Have you tried temporarily switched back to the old one? Yes, if you have a really cheap video card then it could be responsible.


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not exactly sure. I have the vidoe card that came with the motherboard.

Defragged. Done

Thanks for your help

Maybe it's not the performance tab (I'm on a 2k machine right now). Look and see how much memory is in use. How much ram does the machine have?

In the process viewer, how many processes are running?

[Nepa]

What virus software do you have?

Is it up to date?

What is running at startup?

[aslowjoe]

I turn everything off at start up.
My IP has anitvirus that I use.
I have 512mb of ram. Where do you find how much is being used?

The main problem occurs after I have been playing for an hour or so. Everything seems to slow down. Importation of hands is contiunous even set at 4 minutes. Even if I shut everything down then try to open interent explorer it is painfully slow and lags.
If I reboot everything is better(although not as good as it used to be).

It does sound like a memory leak. You can see how much memory is in use w/ the Task Manager.

If you REALLY want to turn off everything that launches at startup, download this: http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml