Windows screen saver snag
I'm not sure if this post is a discussion or a statement, but I learned something from it so thought I'd share the experience.
My oldish but still physically sound laptop (Toshiba Tecra + XP, 1.66GHz processor) running office, Outlook, and a selection of other oddments was getting slower and slower: 10+ minute startup some days, and routine long slow hang-ups despite the CPU showing about 8% useage.
- I purged the hard disk of rubbish, bringing it to about 70% full, marginal improvement.
- I defragged the drive, again marginal improvement.
- I ran a full "fix" with System Mechanic, moderate but temporary improvement.
- Regularly running anti-spyware, ditto.
And finally I seem to have found the problem, and it was entirely of my own making. I'd stuck my large (6.5Gb) electronic photo album in "My Pictures", and was letting the My Pictures Screensaver display a random selection whenever it went to screensaver. All very pretty - however it seems that it was searching through that constantly in the background and the constant access to the hard drive was bringing the whole system to a grinding halt.
So, I switched that off and just went to a blank screen screensaver, and the whole problem - which had been bugging me for months, has gone away.
Just thought I'd share that, in case anybody ever has a similar problem.
G