Hi all

It's been running really slowly for months now. Startup in particular is torturous: at least two or three minutes from the desktop picture loading before I can do anything. CPU goes up to 100% quite frequently.

Here are my OS and RAM specs:

XP Home Edition, Version 2002, Service Pack 2. 2.50GHz, 256MB RAM.

And here are the steps I've taken:

- Bought an external 250GB HD and put all big files (video, music etc) on there. The C:drive now has just 13.8 GB of a possible 74.4 used up.
- Endlessly defragmented and used ScanDisk. (Most recently about a week or so ago.)
- Scanned with Norton and AdAware, as well as trying a few other free scanners found online. Found and got rid of a few little spyware things but nothing to write home about.
- Disabled lots of unnecessary processes from starting automatically on startup.
- Uninstalled all the software I didn't use anymore.
- Moved the paging file from the C:drive to the external HD and gave it an initial size of 800MB; maximum of 1600MB. (Though at the bottom it still says under Total paging size for all drives: 'Minimum allowed - 2MB, Recommended - 381MB, Currently allocated - 381MB', which is a bit weird, but there you go.)
- Changed the graphics settings from True Colour down to High Colour.
- Looked at the active processes and Googled the big ones I didn't recognise: lots were Norton exe files but I didn't want to delete them. Will do if you think it's a good idea, though.
- Probably some other stuff too, but can't remember at the moment!

I'll bite the bullet and get some more RAM installed if absolutely necessary, but if I have any other options to exhaust first I'd be really grateful to hear them.

Thanks.

Hya and welcome to PCHF, I promise not to bite :P

Well, adding some more RAM wouldn't hurt at all, 1Gb is recomended for XP.

Ok well, first of all, I'd get rid of Norton, it's a system hog and completely worthless, AVG is free and much much better.

Next, I would check my process list and identifying what processes ramp up the CPU usage.

After you've identified processes that use up CPU time a lot, post the name here.

Also consider doing the pre-work