Slow Laptop..... why?

wild_eyed

hi, my laptop is a :

Targa GmbH
Mobile AMD Athlon 64
Processor 3000+
1.59 GHz, 512 MB of Ram

running XP with service pack 2

ever since i got broadband in the house my machine has become quite slow, i.e. skipping when playing mp3 files through itunes.

a random check on my task manager shows 48 processes and a cpu usage right now of 7% now its 2 nows its 13. but im sure its normal to vary like that. can anyone think of anything else thats slowing down my pc. its also taking longer to boot than it use too. and longer to shut down.

challengemaster

it doesnt really matter if you have 7% cpu usage, whats your RAM usage? if a system hasnt got enough ram it could cause slowdown

wild_eyed

right now its 379m/1246

oRlyYaRly

Do you use firefox?

zAbbo

Could be Warez?

Em, possible malware / spyware.

Check msconfig, to see what services are running, give it a fine tune and disable uneeded services.

wild_eyed

yes, its using the most memory, 60,000K and i've only got 3 tabs open. but i've always used firefox. its only recently that the computer has been slow.

Ruu_Old

Windows eats up RAM fairly quickly, no harm in getting another stick of 512mb if you can. Have you done the usual anti-virus and anti-spyware scans? As for Firefox, it does have memory issues. I used this method to limit the amount of memory that FF uses and it works far better now.

irlrobins

Moving to laptop forum