alright, guys, i'm baaaack!! this time it's MY computer giving me a headache. i went out of town this last wednesday and was gone til friday night. my computer was completely off the entire time i was gone. friday night when i got home, i turned on my computer and it was sooo slow. i couldn't get it to do anything. the next day my mom was checking email on it and it was taking forever for it to do anything. she would click a link, it would do nothing, she would move on, and like 15 emails (and half an hour) later the browser would pop up. it was crazy. i tried running norton antivirus liveupdate, but it said liveupdate was already running in the background, so i figured this was the problem. i know norton and similar programs can slow down pc's a LOT (norton confidential was WAY screwing up my dad's computer last month). i figured that since i was gone for a few days, it hadn't had the chance to update in a while, and it was updating like crazy or something. i gave it overnight to get anything it still needed. sunday - STILL at a snail's pace. i ran msconfig and turned off *every single 'startup' program*. the only thing in my tray now is that little "add/remove hardware" icon. but it's STILL slow!!! it's a little better, but only maybe 10% faster than this weekend. it took me like 20 minutes to print an 8 page document for my dad. it would print like 5 lines and stop for 30 seconds, print 5 lines, and stop for 30 seconds. i was pulling my hair out! programs are running a little faster, though. i have run norton and spybot and updated everything and they don't find anything bad. i've done ctrl-alt-del like 25 times and the cpu is always at 100% (and still currently is). the programs using the most "juice" are as follows: explorer 22,371k svchost 23,832k spoolsv 12,856k what in the heck do i do!? what happened? it's an athlon 64 2800 w/ 512 mb ram. *nothing* has changed since last week - i have no idea what's slowing it down! please help!
