I am cleaning up an old system that I have.

WinXP home

768 RAM

Windows explorer acts sluggish.  the flashlight icon appears for about 5 seconds when I open "my computer"

When I move the task manager window over firefox I get the "trails" effect that windows is notorious for and firefox jumps up to using 90% of my system resources!

I have run multiple virus SCANNERS, I have run spy bot and ad aware. I have run 3 separate registry CLEANERS and defragmented my drives.

Anyone know what could be going on? Have you ran disc clean up? I would do that as well as the defrag, that you have done.

Usually when i get computers like that i just do a clean install.If it's some old machine, why not a clean install of Windows?I did run disc clean up and I didnt have much of a change. Its not that old of a system the XP install is about 12 months old. I dont want to reinstall XP as that isnt really a "fix" nor would I learn anything.




I have included an image so that you can SEE how the process shoots up when I simply move the task manager around.

a program like firefox takes close to 30 seconds before it opens

I wouldn't think that it is the harddrive.

I have 13.4 gigs of free space and 5.57 gigs used using NTFS file system. I do not have indexing enabled.

http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/479/problembl0.jpgOk then, what is actually taking up the cpu usage in the processes tab?Firefox


hmm. . . . LET me completely remove it and reinstall it.


But that still may not solve the issue with windows explorer taking so long to RESPOND. Same issue after removing Firefox and running 2 registry cleaners (again)


I get the same problem with internet explorer

http://img141.imageshack.us/img141/627/problemrs2.jpg