G'day, G'day. Need some advice on my Dell laptop. I'm running XP SP3. Long story short, about a week ago I was running an Auslogics disk defrag when half way through it the system slowed down to a snails pace. It completed but it took about 2 hours to complete what usually takes 5 minutes. The only other noticable problems are the first time I open Firefox it's slow (takes about 30 seconds to open) and if I open the Control Panel for the first time it takes about a minute to open. Once they're open, if I close them and try to reopen them, they're fine. They open up as per normal in a second or two. If I restart the computer, the same thing happens, slow at first start up, then fine. I've run the Auslogics disc defrag again and it's still the same. Fine until half way through then snails pace. I've run Advanced Windows Care to try and sort it out but have had no success. Any suggestions would be appreciated. The only other thing I know of is to start over, clean slate and re-install everything.
Usually that behavior means the OS is having difficulty loading or finding a file. First, it you installed software just before this problem occurred, uninstall it and try booting and loading again. If that doesn't work, then go to Start/Run and type msconfig, then go to the Startup tab and try turning off various programs... then reboot and reload. Do you have a Ghost or Acronis Image you can restore.. or a clone? If none of those work, then you have to consider doing a fresh install of the OS, as perhaps there is problem with Windows itself.
Thanks for the input fella's. I'm probably going to go with the clean slate. Start over and reinstall everything. I've got a suspicion that the cause of my problems is a recent pass I did with Ccleaner. May have cleaned more than I bargained for. Cheers