Laptop slowness

[QF A330]

Hi all,

I have a 1 year old laptop with Vista Ultimate CPU Duo T9400 4 gb ram and it has slowed down to about 20% of it's speed, internet explorer needs refreshing all of the time and the icons on the screen come and go several times a day.

This has only happened since returning with the pc from SE Asia this week.

I have a Norton anti virus which is current and paid for, not a pitated version.

Any hints would be appreciated.

Thanks

[Lancelot37]

Do you have a regular clean out of rubbish? Try www.ccleaner.com (http://www.ccleaner.com) before you move to other methods. Also let it clean the registry.

[Bushfiva]

Try an online scanner such as Trend Micro's Housecall to see if you've picked up a nasty Norton doesn't detect. There's also a slim chance Norton itself is the culprit: it's known to break from time to time.

[Capot]

Only yesterday I read a piece in ComputerActive about dealing with slowdowns, and one piece of advice was to open Task Manager or equivalent and look at Processes to see what's taking up the memory. So I did that on my laptop, and lo and behold found a process consuming huge resources (ie about 170,000 K vs Firefox 81,000K, for example). Googling that process name (FCPMS) actually put me straight into a forum on the Freecom website, which recommended downloading an update to solve the evidently well-known problem with Freecom Media Suite. So I did that, the laptop has speeded up again, and I went to bed feeling almost techielike.

Lesson learned is look at the Processes' use of resources.

[twiggs]

Hard disk failure is also a big possibility so ensure you have backed up while it is still working at all.
If it is running so slowly, then using any Windows based utilities will also take forever, so may I suggest you use a bootable disk something like the Ultimate Boot CD (http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/) which has disk scanning apps as well as virus scanning and cloning/backup.

[Wader2]

Gibson Research SPINRITE also works.

[QF A330]

Thanks for all of your replies and I have tried them all with some sucess with cleaning out downloaded junk, but have since discovered that the power plan had changed to a low performance mode and now that it has been altered to high performance mode it is rocket ship fast.

Keep up the good work guys.