I have had my Dell 8500 laptop for about 4 years with no problems. Its a little outdated now, but still holds its own with a 2.0 gHz P4 m processor, 1.5 GIG ram, and a decent mobile Nvidia card with 64 mb dedicated memory. Recently it has been acting incredibly sluggish and I figured it was time for a complete reformat and fresh installation of WinXP. I completely wiped out the hard drive and installed Windows fresh, but it didn't seem to help. In fact, if anything my computer seemed even slower!

The computer has absolutely nothing on it but Windows, Firefox, iTunes, Works Suite, Office 2003, and Symantec. I updated too all the most recent drivers for my hardware and installed several windows updates, neither of which HELPED. My computer is now to the point where simply opening Firefox or EXCEL can take as long as 5-7 minutes. When this happens, I am not even able to bring up my system monitor by pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL. The cursor turns shows the the computer is thinking for a few seconds, then it goes back to an arrow and the program/monitor won't open. It doesn't seem to take my computer any longer than usual to start up when it has shut down and I don't encounter any complete freezes or blue screens.

Now I suspect the problem lies not in the software but the hardware. I ran both the Microsoft memory checker and Gold Memory. I also used a set of tools made by Seagate to run a complete test on my hard drive. No problems were found in either of these components. I'm not sure how to test the processor or motherboard. I suspect the problem may have something to do with overheating although the computer's fan is still operational. It has a tendency to get VERY hot in a short period of time. Also, I've had an overheating problem a few years ago which fried a stick of RAM which I had to replace.

Anyone have any idea what the problem could be or how I could possibly diagnose it so I know what needs to be replaced? Thank you for any help you are able to provide!Download SpeedFan, install it, and let's see what it says about your temperatures. It also provides some info on various voltages flowing through your system. How many fans do you have, altogether? Have you looked inside your computer case to see whether a lot of dust has accumulated? If it's dirty, you should clean it.Laptop.
Speedfan is still a good suggsestionOk, I finally got Windows Task Manager to open up and I found a big problem. svchost.exe is using 99% of my CPU and 132 MB of memory. As far as I know, this is a normal windows component. Why would it be using all my CPU on a fresh install of windows?

I also downloaded SpeedFan. Its not giving my fan speeds or voltage readings, but the temperature monitor is working. I just started up my computer about 10 minutes ago and I'm already at 46C which isn't surprising seeing as how my CPU is at a nonstop 100%. And to answer your earlier question, my laptop only has one fan that is visible to me. It seems like it spins full speed but when I put my hand to the vent it feels like it's not pulling a whole lot of air through.After doing some research I think I figured it out. The problem was really in Windows auto update. There is a bug that causes it to eat up MAJOR CPU resources. To fix:

1) Update to WUAgent v3 (http://download.windowsupdate.com/v7/windowsupdate/redist/standalone/WindowsUpdateAgent30-x86.exe)
(if necessary, run with command-line /wuforce)

2) Run MS KB927891 (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=7A81B0CD-A0B9-497E-8A89-404327772E5A&displaylang=en)

3) Reboot

Thanks for the help all.