Thanks to all responders, plenty to get stuck into.
From the top down, ish.
The machine is a 2.5Gig Celeron desktop with 512Meg of RAM. The disc is an IDE, showing 73Gigs total and 33Gigs used. It is using DMA Being a Dell machine the "rescue disc" is a hidden area on the C drive, I don't know if that is in addition to the volumes given or included.
I am beginning to understand the info given in task manager, it sets 100% commit at about 1200Megs or a bit more than twice the physical memory size so whenever commit goes above about 40% there will be a lot of swapping going on. Is there a "rule of thumb" for setting swap file size?
WinXP, AVG, windose firewall is on, Spybot is lurking. The whole lot seems to have slowed considerably since upgrading to IE 8? (it is not my machine!).
The disc access light seems to blink most of the time and is often on more than off. Some evenings the AVG scan runs from 7pm and is not completed when we go to bed at 11pm plus so we leave it running through the night.
I am not familiar with hijackthis, but I am keen to learn. I understand that it produces a report of what is going on but makes no attempt to identify or fix issues. How does one learn to interpret what it spews out?
Does anyone know how to re-install WinXP from the hidden partition on the C (or is it D?) drive on a Dell machine? It has not been cleaned up for 4 years.
Simonta quote "Always difficult to judge experience levels from afar...but, and apologies if you can hear the gnashing of octagenerian gums on avian seed cases,". Well I am not a complete beginner at this although I don't do it enough to keep current. I first built a computer when Physiform and bad sectors were needed to get a disc drive up and running and Win98 was still over the horizon. Since I have been "sysop" around here we have not lost any data to viruses or machine faults. Just this week I threw together a Phenom 955 machine and got it up with a dos boot floppy, I will be putting linux on it. If it can do everything my other half needs then it will be bye bye WinXP......... It ought to be quick enough for a while.
I know that there are many processes launched when windoze launches, is there an easy way to identify the ones that are key to everyday computer use and which can be dispensed with? I have tried gooooogling all of the tasks in the task manager to try to figure out which to kill, there must be an easier way.
Thanks, again, for your interest. Must do some work now, fun though this is.
Till later,
Rans6.....