Hello,

I am new to this forum, so please forgive me if I make any familiar newbie mistakes.
My problem is this: My computer seems to be on a yo-yo of speed. At times, its speed isn't too bad, but most of the time, the speed is extremely slow...the hard drive is constantly crunching away at something. For instance, when I got up this morning, the computer ran great for about five minutes. I was browsing Scribd (had two windows open). All of the sudden, my computer went into slow motion time. Below is a list of how slow this thing gets.
1. After I hit the "home" button to begin a search for slow computer problems, it took well over a minute to bring my home page up.
2. After I downloaded Hijackthis, I clicked on the Internet Explorer button to come back to this web site...it took 3 minutes and 37 seconds for my computer to load my home page.
3. Once I registered on this page, I clicked on the new private message button...it took 1 minute and 12 seconds to load the page.
4. Sometimes, the computer gets so slowed down that the screen flashes to black and slowly begins to display everything again.
5. Sometimes, a white, somewhat translucent filter covers the screen. At the top, in parenthesis, the Explorer bar reads (Not Responding). It stays like this for at least a minute or more before coming around.

I'm pretty sure that my computer is running on 512 Mb of memory...of which task manager says I'm using around 77% of it at any given time. Of course, when I ctrl/alt/del for task manager, it takes around 2 to 3 minutes for it to come up...

Anyway, I downloaded and ran Hijackthis. I read that someone might be able to help if I posted my scan results. Here they are:

I just want to thank anyone in advance for offering any help. I'm beginning to think that I just need to buy a new computer. I hope that you all have a great day.

Thanks,

Matt

Attached Files

hijack.txt (6.2 KB, 814 views)

Hi Simon,

I have checked you log file, every thing seems to be fine.

Also its advisable to upgrade your memory (RAM) to atleast 2 GB

And try some Effective Windows Vista Performance Tips

__________________

SysChat Free computer tech support

Just out of curiosity.
How much space you have left on your hard drive ?
Sounds like a lot of churning for no good reason Have you done a disk cleanup lately or defragmented the drive ?
That's just a couple of ideas I can think of at the moment

I appreciate you all for checking out my specs and offering your advice. I think I'm just going to buy more memory and see what happens.
Right now, my computer only has 31% of its hard drive space and not a lot of its memory available.
Should I buy a new hard drive, too?

Thanks

What is the exact value for the remaining space ?
31% of a 40 gb hard drive is a lot different than 31% of a 5 gb hard drive
I am guessing the hard drive is ok unless it's sverely fragmented
I don't think more memory will help if the hard drive has issues
I would try to find out why is the hard drive crunching so much
Check to see if you have some program running in the background like an update or something like that.
I would also check the event viewer to see if there are any errors

Ok...I've got 31.8 GB free of 74.5 GB hard drive space...about 42%.
The only thing that I've caught running in the background when my computer is running very, very slow is Windows Defender updating itself. But, that's not all the time. I also clean up files and defrag regulary. I'm running Windows Vista Home Premium on this computer...

AMD Athlon XP 3000+ 2.10GHz
512 MB RAM
32-bit operating system
74.5 GB hard drive

Thanks for the input. I think I'll just keep complaining until my wife gives in and lets us get a new computer.

Matt

With vista you are running the BARE minimum of memory. I HIGHLY advise you upgrade this if you are able. You will see an improvment in speed but you need to know that Vista is an operating system that is slow and this is one of the biggest problems with it.