First post for me as a new member.

My wife has a Packard Bell Laptop running WinXP with Service Pack 2. The laptop effectively seems to run permenantly slow when selecting progs to run and internet access etc.

I have tried various things:

- checked the task manager and CPU etc - there is little to no real drain on resources
- cleared cookies, cache, etc
- run virus checks and adaware etc
- looked to see if any progs were resource greedy - nothing that I can see

I did find one thing that may be of interest to others. Packard Bell uses an IE style frontpage end when selecting outlook express to view the mailbox and to collect mail from her NTL account. I didn't think this was relevant until attempting to remove a prog at start-up (msconfig) on my wife's computer because she didn't use it - MSN Messenger - that I found it stopped outlook express from connecting to the mailbox account. Error messages came up the IP address or something couldn't connect to it. I tried put MSN messenger back in the start-up but it seems to permanently break the link with the other progs - the error messages continued.

I went through System Restore to the previous day and restored settings that way. The computer is back online for picking up emails, but running SLOW still continues. It was not that way when we bought it, so we are blaming oursleves, but we don't know what are blame is and how to solve it.

Apologies for the long post, but thought if I mentioned what I have done it may help anyone who might have answer. Grateful for any suggestions, if nothing else.
Thanks

Hello SIMBian and welcome to the Techconnect forums.

The bad thing with computers it that thery are so complex that its often hard to pin-point the source of problems but that doesn't top us from trying. You mentioned the laptop ran just fine at the beginning so probably something later on (like a newly installed program) might have caused these problems.

So, assuming there are no viruses and/or spyware then I'd look into the soft and maybe the OS too. Check your CPU and if its runnig at its normal frequency - a lot of mobile CPU's have 2 speeds - one for idle and simple tasks (800 MHz as an example) and the actual marketing speed for more intensive tasks - maybe something set your CPU to 800 (or something like that) and it doesn't return to its full speed. Also, try and check the BIOS for the memory frequencies and settings. If you are using IE to surf the web I recommend you try out other borwsers like Firefox or Opera and see how fast they work.

Access time is also linked to the hdd and memory so maybe something is slowing one of these two down. You might want to check System Restore too as it can pile up a lot of files and take quite a lot of space too. Also check the size of the Virtual memory at System Properties > Performance Options > Advanced.

I hope it helps and please be sure to check back and let us know your progress.