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Luke_Barshack

My laptop has suddenly become very slow at starting up and generally loading up programs etc. Ordinarily, I'd just give it a cleanup but there is 26.9 GB of free space on the hard drive, which strikes me as a relatively healthy laptop.

Another interesting point is when playing music; it will often literally slow the track down, seemingly in a struggle to play it. I've never experienced this before; even an old, slow, full PC will play an MP3 all right after it has eventually loaded it up.

Any help you could offer would be most helpful.

Thank you!

Luke_Barshack

I should also give you the following specs;

I'm running Windows XP Home Edition, 1.81GHz Processor, 896 MB RAM

TitaniumBlack

Slow, stuttering hard drive? Most likely due to fragmentation. Do a disk cleanup with CCleaner followed by a defrag of the disk and a boot-time defrag to defrag system files. Defragging regularly is good to keep performance optimized and to improve the life of the drive.

In the long-term, to keep fragmentation under control, it's good to go with a reliable, automatic defragmenter that runs in the background intelligently ie doesn't kick in unless there are enough free system resources to run without interfering with more important applications. Then, you won't need to schedule a defrag job for a specific time, or run the defrag manually. It's quite convenient.

joe5

Hy there Luke, welcome to PCHF.

It could also be that you have a malware problem, to check that please follow the instructions in the "Prework" link below in my sig and post back with the resulting logs please.

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