Terence

35 processes isn't that much. It really depends on how much programs you usually load on start up.

Checking for spyware is ur best bet as that's usually the culprit these days. As for disk defrag, the HDs today are pretty fast so unless your computer is very old you won't see much of a speed gain.

Simon's suggestion of checking your swap file is good as well. Make sure you have at least 3GBs of free space left on your HD where your swap file resides or your computer will start crashing.

Jasonoff

S2kRob

I've had Norton and Spybot for a while, I ran those and that's not the problem.

It's also not Outlook.

I think Simon is right, it's my swap file. When the computer slows down, the hard drive is going like crazy.

I have approx 3GB of free space right now.

What do I do to fix this?

osc

1) buy more ram (1gb is good enough) - no real need for a swap file
2) make some more space on your HD, technically 1gb of swap space is a ton...
3) partition your HD (C: for OS/apps, D:+ for all other crap, games, etc)
4) upgrade your HD (if possible) to SATA, higher RPM, lower seek times, SCSI, etc

last but not least...there ain't nothing like a nice clean format.. GHOST your machine right after..so next time you format, it'll take 2 mins to re-image.

S2kRob

Okay, the computer is only 11 months old, so it's pretty good.

Now, I freed up about 5gigs of space (total) on my harddrive (from about 1.5) and the computer is back to normal. I did get a message saying that XP has increased my virtual memory allocation also.

I am wondering though, if 5 gigs of free space seems excessive to anyone?

QIKSILVR

Rob, you need a bigger hard drive or maybe you should cut down on the downloading of p o rn .

XP likes it's space.. How much RAM are you running? What is the size of your hard drive?

S2kRob

512mb physical memory, 1.5gig virtual memory, 1.1 gig page file sapce, 40 gig harddrive.

QIKSILVR

Hmm.. I would get more RAM first then, bring it up to a gig.

Terence

Well.. when you were down to 3GBs left, your HD was 90%+ full. It's usually best to leave your HD at 80% or less full so your HD has more readily available clusters to work with. I have a 80GB media drive and it crawls when there's only 5GB left but blazes a lot faster once I free up 5 or more GBs. The speed increase you get after that 80% is usually not noticable tho. Oh.. and when I say 80% it's only an approximate number.