[Bombario]

I'm a total nut about keeping my computer running top-notch. If there's any hint of lag time when I try to open an application, load a web site, or whatever, I go right to Adware/Spybot/etc. (Of course, I'm so nuts about security, I rarely have an infection.)

Just now, my computer started dragging in a way I've never seen before. Most apps would handle with blazing speed, and I could switch between open apps in a flash, but Firefox would throw an error every time I tried to open it and I.E. would take about 10 seconds to even understand that I told it to go to a web page.

Also, Spybot would stagnate (just stop / pause) every time it hit a certain point. Winamp would take forever to open, and my FTP client showed small signs of dragginess.

I set Spybot to open at next system startup, rebooted...and everything's perfectly fine now. Does anyone know what in the world causes these things? Is it just some random memory leak or something that just causes Windows to start going bonkers?

 

[keymaker]

have you defrag your hdd recently?

if not check out www.majorgeeks.com and download diskeeper which is a really good defraggin tool. install it on your computer and then defrag your hdd. see if defrag solves your issue.

 

[jflan]

If you like Ad-Aware you'll love Ewido. Seems likes it always finds more junk when I launch it after running Ad-Aware.

Keymaker's right about defrag...although I'm betting that you're up to date on that. For a third party defragger I like PerfectDisk (free 30 day trial) better than Diskeeper. DK "kicks" your native XP defragger aside when you install it. If you want to return to your XP dfragger you have to get rid of DK and sometimes do a repair to restore the XP defragger.

My guess is that DK needs parts of the XP defrag code to function.

PerfectDisk happily co-exists with the XP defragger so you can compare the two and does an excellent job as well.

Regards,
JF
At the East edge of the next pond