Computer running very sluggish suddenly, need urgent advice.

Hey there.
As of the last 3-4 days, my computer has been running very sluggish in general. I dont recall having installed anything new recently but just to make sure I have uninstalled a whole bunch of applications...no luck.
I have had a look to see if any process is using alot of processor power, but theyre not.
A strange thing I noticed yesterday was that If i close an application, say Opera, it'll run smoothly for a minute. I thought it was opera causing my problems, but soon enough it started running sluggish again. I then tried closing my antivirus application Antivir and experienced the very same thing! Then the same thing with MSN! :confused:

I dont know what could be causing this since my processor usage isnt high, and I'm somewhat desperate for help.

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Originally Posted by Atheist

Hey there.
As of the last 3-4 days, my computer has been running very sluggish in general. I dont recall having installed anything new recently but just to make sure I have uninstalled a whole bunch of applications...no luck.
I have had a look to see if any process is using alot of processor power, but theyre not.
A strange thing I noticed yesterday was that If i close an application, say Opera, it'll run smoothly for a minute. I thought it was opera causing my problems, but soon enough it started running sluggish again. I then tried closing my antivirus application Antivir and experienced the very same thing! Then the same thing with MSN! :confused:

I dont know what could be causing this since my processor usage isnt high, and I'm somewhat desperate for help.

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Maybe your windows drive is too fragmented. See what happens after you defrag your C: drive.

Pradeep :)

Alright im doing a defrag right now...I dont like how Vistas defrag tool doesnt show the progress though...
Im going to try to update all drivers I can think of if the defrag doesnt work...perhaps its a driver acting weird...

How long has the computer been up running? If it's more than a few days, try restart it and see if it makes any difference...

Hey stanav thanks for the reply.
I always turn my computer of during the night so its never up and running for too long.

Atheist, do you notice any unusual behavior that suggests a virus infection other than just being sluggish (slow)?

Nope I'm not noticing anything that suggest that I've got a virus..I ran a check using Antivir and it returned nothing..perhaps I should try another antivirus software aswell just to make sure.

I followed kind mr VisualAds advice and disabled all startup items in msconfig and rebooted, to see if that made any difference. Unfortunately it didnt. At first it seemed to run fairly well but it slowly got more sluggish.

:(

try going to your harddrive manufactuers website and downloading some diagnostic tools to check the health of your harddrive it might be going deffective

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Originally Posted by Atheist

Nope I'm not noticing anything that suggest that I've got a virus..I ran a check using Antivir and it returned nothing..perhaps I should try another antivirus software aswell just to make sure.

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Or online scanners.

is your drive full to the point that your swap file is no longer able to be created? How much ram do you have?

I dont think my drive is that full...I'll check when I get home.
I've got 4gb of ram, and at most im using 2gb when this occurs.

@dark shadow: Yeah I'll try that aswell when I get home.

Edit: Ah yes I should also say that yesterday I booted into my XP install to see how things where..and it ran very smooth. So its only when I'm running on Vista that this occurs.

perhaps you're the victim of an auto-update?

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Originally Posted by Lord Orwell

perhaps you're the victim of an auto-update?

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I removed the recently installed updates, but it made no difference.. Not sure what to do at this point.

get ahold of a memory checking utility and do a complete memory scan. It's possilble that due to the differences in the way xp and vista access memory, your computer is suffering from a bad chip that xp isn't accessing. Vista pretty well uses up all the ram in the system to cache prorams.

why don't you get another defrag software, ashampoo, or defraggler which is free