Computer running really slow all of a sudden

[John Squire]

For aboout a week now my computer has been running a lot slower than normal. When trying to play videos they will play jerky video & audio, defragmenting takes a lot longer than normal & just doing general tasks have a sluggish manner.

I installed a couple of things in the last week (Google Earth, Google Desktop & a couple of other things), but i've now uninstalled all of them.

I've ran Ad-aware 6 & Norton antivirus & removed anything they found, I've also tried to system restore however when i try it says it can't restore to that point for some reason (tried on a few different dates). I've also ran msconfig & unticked anything that I don't need.

My system specs are:-

P4 3.4GHz HT
1.5GB DDR RAM
200GB HD
WinXP SP2

Anyone know whats wrong or anything I could try?

Cheers

 

[modo77]

did you run the scans again after you'd cleaned the PC? Sometimes they come back after reboot.
Also have you checked your processes list to see if anything is using a lot of CPU/mem? Or something new you don't recogise.

 

[John Squire]

I've just checked under 'Device Manager' and I have 2 primary IDE channels and one is in Ultra DMA 2 & the other is in PIO Mode even though its got 'DMA if avaiable' selected. I also have a Secondary IDE channel but that says 'Not Applicable' in Transfer mode so I'm assuming hasn't got anything on there.

How do you check what is connected to each IDE channel?

I've got 1 hard drive & 2 DVD drives in my PC.

 

[John Squire]

I think I've sorted it now, one of the devices on my primary IDE channel was on PIO Mode, so I uninstalled the channel & I think thats solved it.

Cheers everyone.