[JamesN]

Last night I had my laptop running, playing music through Itunes, when all of a sudden my computer started running very very slow. Now I have Norton 360 installed so I am used to occasional slowdowns when something is updating or scanning in the background, but this has now been going on for a day and a half. I'm not sure exactly what is causing the problem but the light which flashes showing some activity is going on is always blinking or at a steady pace, even when I'm not on my computer. I've looked at the processes that are running but I'm nervous about stopping any of them because I don't want to screw my computer up.

I have run additional Adware and Malware scans on top of the scans that Norton performs. Does anyone have any idea what might be causing this slowdown? My computer has become so slow that the mouse no longer glides along the screen, it jumps, and I can not play a song on my laptop because it pauses every 2 or 3 second.

My specs are:

Microsoft Windows XP
Home Edition
Service Pack 3

HP AMD Turion 64 Mobile Processor ML-37, 2.0 GHz
1 GB of RAM

If you need any other information please let me know. All of your help is, as always, appreciated.

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Maybe you just need to clear some %temp% files and old restore points...

Try this free program out. I use it just about every day.
http://www.ccleaner.com/

It won't clear old restore points, but it will clear %temp% files and that usually gives you a boost in speed.

[AitrusSkyy]

Maybe you just need to clear some %temp% files and old restore points...

Try this free program out. I use it just about every day.
http://www.ccleaner.com/

It won't clear old restore points, but it will clear %temp% files and that usually gives you a boost in speed.

[Granz00]

Have you been running your laptop non-stop? It is useful every now and then to completely turn it off for a decent period of time. This would clear out some garbage in memory, and actually allow all of the transistors to loose their charge.

So you had iTunes running, doing nothing else, then it all of a suddenly slowed down? You weren't doing anything such as browsing the internet?

[JamesN]

Yeah, iTunes was running and nothing else, I was elsewhere in the room. I hardly ever actually shut down my laptop, just restart it every couple of days when it gets a bit bogged down or something gets updated. I'll run ccleaner tonight and then shut the laptop down for the whole night. I'll update this thread tomorrow if I see any changes.

The main thing that is puzzling me is that the activity light (don't know what it's actually called) is always blinking and the hardrive is making noise like there is something constantly running in the background. I'm not sure if this is something that happens if your computer has an infection?

Thanks for the help.

[Granz00]

So it sounds like your HDD is constantly trying to either read or write something. I can't say that I know too much about this. Hopefully it was just a random Windows problem, that will be fixed after leaving it off overnight. If not, then it might possibly be a good idea to try out these steps for checking, and getting rid of malware.

Edit: Changed url into a link.

Edited by Granz00, 23 October 2008 - 12:43 PM.