My Computers really, really slow on a P4

[Lucifer]

I'm using WinXP and I'll post my system specs below, but it takes 10 minutes to load and ages to load a program. I've done a virus check with AVG and a spyware check with Adaware but I'm not sure why. Anyone got any ideas?

My Computer Specs:
2.53 P4 Processor
MSI 845E motherboard(I Believe)
MSI GForce 4 MX420 Graphics card
256DDR Ram
3x20GB Harddrives
Win XP Service Pack 2
A Whole bunch of Programmes

[acal3000]

have you make a clean of junk files (tmp,cookies,internet cache)? defragmented recently?
used a registry cleaner?
checked the drive for errors with the chkdsk?

If not

you should do that now

[Lucifer]

Whats a good reg cleaner to use?

[DaMoMo]

tune up utilities 2004

[essexman]

regcleaner is good. as long as ur careful.
have you updated ur drivers??
wot file system are u using?? (FAT32 or NTFS)
last time my pc took that long to load up. i just format and reinstalled it :( took a while but sorted my prob. you should do that every now and then.

[Morpher]

That normally happens when you have too much junk in your pc. Unistall or delete the things you dont need, run regclean, then defrag. Make sure you delete the files in C:\Documents and Settings\<login name>\Local Settings\Temp and in c:\windows\temp
Also you may have too many progs running in the background that are initiated at startup try closing some of them

[Schick]

Defrag, registry cleaner, virus scan, adware scan, and for the love of god get some more RAM!

[DABhand]

Yeah sounds like those pesky worms that love to suck up available resources, had a guy come into my shop today complaining about slowness, booted his PC went into registry and found 10 different worms on startup. He was not a happy chappy (didnt even have SP2 installed) now he has and is very happy.

Anyways goto start menu > run > regedit

Navigate the the following branches in the registry window

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE>SOFTWARE>MICROSOFT>WINDOWS>CURRENT VERSION>RUN

You will find some nasty virii there, most of them are easy to spot like the unusual filenames (most of them with NO paths just file names)

Also look in the RUN ONCE and RUN ONCE EX branches they will probably reside there too.

If so, then reboot PC press F8 just after the POST screen, pick safe mode, remove the registry items, delete the files from your C:\windows\prefetch folder, delete the files that were removed from your registry (most likely to be in c:\windows or c:\windows\system32) and turn off system restore (a friend of virii and worms)

Alternatively use a free online scanner to detect them :P

[DABhand]

Oh yeah also this registry path

HKEY_LOCAL_USER>SOFTWARE>MICROSOFT>WINDOWS>CURRENT VERSION>RUN

[Lucifer]

Thankyou people