Slowdown in Computer Responce????

[Galadala]

After I load my Computer into Windows it begins to hang for 4 or 5 seconds every half a minute or so. I could be doing as little as moving the mouse accross the screen or playing a game of Quake III Arena and it still happens.

My Computer Specs are:

Abit KT7
128MB PC133
Winfast Geforce2 Pro (Nvidia D3 6.31 Installed)
40GB Maxtor DiamondMax
700Mhz Tbird
MS Intellimouse Explorer (On PS2)
SB Live!
Linksys 10/100 EtherFast LAN Card
DVD-Rom Drive
CD-Burner
Windows ME

When I get into windows and all my programs fully load it seems that my computer just hangs a bit for about 5 seconds or so. This is very distracting as it does happen all the time. In a Q3A game, playing MP3's, all the time. Does anyone know why this is so or what I can do to fix it?

Your help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Killbat]

Bring up the task manager and kill anything stupid that you don't need. Maybe one of your "helper monkey" programs has run amok.

 

[Krodge]

I've had this happen before actually. One word DEFRAG! for some reason this cured all of my problems. No clue why though. Oh yeah close all of those background programs, especially virus scan since scan software always seems to have problems.

 

[Y22KC]

Another helpful suggestion is to empty the temp folder for windows before Defraging the hard drive. To do this, you need to restart you computer in DOS. Type "temp" (without the quotation marks). Next type: del *tmp.
This will work wonders for your computer speed because windows sometimes will not delete the Temp folder automatically when you shut the computer down. Your Temp folder can become large if you never perform this operation. Hope this helps. There really could be a thousand different problems, but the ones listed on this post are the most common.

 

[Krodge]

Also if you are on a LAN disable file sharing, especially larger ones like at a college. For some reason in the dorms when someone tries to view you on the network it just slows down the computer to extremely slow speeds. I used to have file sharing on and had this happen, turned it off it never happened again, turned it on after a couple of weeks, and it started to lag again, turned it off and haven't had a problem with it still. (well I've had problems just not that problem)

 

[Galadala]

Get this people! The problem was Norton Utilities 2001!
Once i took it off the system worked fine. I left on NAV 2001 but NU was causing the problem.