Excessive Slowness on Laptop

[GoodRevrnd]

This is an old AMD K6 500mhz laptop running XP. It runs at an acceptable speed in safe mode, in normal all hell breaks lose. Everything takes forever to launch, excessive disk read, random apps using processor time for no apparent reason. I've triple scanned this thing for viruses w/ Panda/Symantec/TrendMicro and sweeped it w/ Spybot and Spysweeper, and I managed to nuke about a dozen trojans and backdoors and god knows how much spyware. I even disabled system restore to make sure the damn things don't come back. I've defragged a horribly fragmented hard drive as well, the thing still runs like crap. I've tried disabling nearly everything in startup and still nothing. Anyone have any ideas what might be causing this?

 

[edelbrock]

How much ram is in it?

 

[saltedeggman]

just format it 🙂

 

[GoodRevrnd]

Yeah it's only got like 256 and I understand it's going to be slow, but this is like ungodly satan slow. My g/f's computer is a K6 600 256 running XP and it's nothing like this thing (yes I know desktops have faster HDDs).

 

[edelbrock]

I have to agree with reformatting the drive. I have an older laptop and have reformatted it several times because of all of the junk that piles up on there makes it so slow. It is a PIII 600 with 192megs of ram. Runs good when it is reformatted.

 

[Geforcer]

The difference between safe mode and normal will be substantial, considering the bare minimum is loaded in safe mode. How much HDD space is being used? If it's pretty close to filled up, you might try freeing some space up. Also, look into removing some startup items to free resources. Could also try disabling some services that might not be needed (especially that darned security center in sp2 😛). Anyway, give those a try, might help a little.