Hit CTRL-SHIFT-ESC and see how many processes are running, and report, please.
In addition to previous advice, you may want to run a CHKDSK /F. Filesystem corruption can cause slowness.
Also try downloading and running Crap Cleaner (
www.ccleaner.com). In addition to cleaning up the endless trail of unneeded garbage that Windoze generates, it also has one of the few automated registry cleaners (the "Issues" function) that I sort of, kinda trust. I still suggest making a backup of the registry when you use it (takes only a few seconds), but I find it's seldom needed.
Also, to piggyback on Areeda's advice, when you do the defrag, see what the pagefile and MFT fragmentation looks like. Both can hurt performance. I generally do an MFT defragmentation (requires special, bootable software) if there are six or more MFT fragments. Anything less than that and I don't see a noticeable improvement, and there is some minor risk involved (especially if the HD is old).
On the topic of pagefiles, an inadequate pagefile can hurt performance. By default it's set as a dynamic file, but I find I get better performance by setting it to a static size of 1.5 times physical RAM, but not less than 1024 MB.
Most computer techs get loads of these kinds of jobs. Windows computers require tune-ups once or twice a year, on average. It may be worth the money to call a local geek and let him or her spend an hour or two with the machine.
Rich
