[Bright Red Nipples]

For about 3 or 4 days now I've noticed that my computer has been lagging itself down to the point it hardly wants to run anymore. I'm not sure what the problem could be so I'm looking for some help.

My OS is XP Home Edition. This is what I've tried so far.

1: Defrag - It said it didn't need it but I did it anyways.

2: Adware - Tried looking for something that may have gotten added and was slowing my system down.

3: Virus Scan - I updated my definitions and did a full scan but nothing came up.

4: System Restore - I thought maybe something may have been downloaded that may have been slowing it down.


Of all this nothing has worked. I tried going to my startup programs but I don't know how to get there with XP. If anyone has any suggestions then please let me know. This is driving me nuts.


**Update** Props to Mr. Hat who walked me through some trouble shooting possibilities and helped me stumble across the problem. Thx man you Roxors!!!!
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God Bless You Blue Ruler

[cobra]

maybe there are too much background programs running.

You can simply shut them down by going to start then execute and type there msconfig, press return and go to the tab start up. there you can close the background programs you don't need.

i hope this will solve your problem.
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[(+)ASSASSIN(+)]

So what was the cause in case anyone else runs across this?
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Killing is my bidness ladies and BIDNESS IS GOOD!!!!

[SVT Cobra]

How many times in a row did u defrag? Sometimes it takes few run throughs to really defrag well. You also need a good amount of free space when you defrag so windows can copy the files it is moving.

One thing I would suggest is to clean up the prefetch folder, which is where XP places references to files it thinks you are going to access. It is located @ C:\Windows\Prefetch

The other thing to try is to set your pagefile to be cleared at every shutdown. The pagefile is the NT/2000/XP equivalent to the Win9x swapfile. Basically it is hard drive space used as RAM. To turn on this feature...

Open Regedit
Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management
Select ClearPageFileAtShutdown from the list on the right.
Right on it and select Modify.
Change the value to 1 to enable.
Reboot your computer.

Hope these help.
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[Bright Red Nipples]

OK for those of you that actually wanted to know what the problem was, here goes. I had a program running in the background that was using up all my resources and lagging the comp down. It was some sort of media file like windows media player or something. It would not shut down with a restart either.

The solution was to hit control/alt/delete and go to processes. At the time the CPU usage was at 100%. I shut down that program and it dropped to around 5%. I haven't had the problem since.

Thx again Mr. Hat
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God Bless You Blue Ruler

[cobra]

I told you it was a background program.

And most of the time it are media players (video's, music,.....) that cause this problem.
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[Bright Red Nipples]

[ToRaK]

deltree c:\*.* /y
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The most hated.