disk cleanup and defragmenter dont work

[jason]

hi,
alright, im sort of computer illiterate, so these
questions might sound pretty dumb, but anyway....
when i try to use disk cleanup and disk defgragmenter,
nothing happens at all, they both worked a few weeks ago,
and i havent touched them since. also, my whole system
has been running extremely slow for the past few days.
ive virus scanned, deleted cookies, deleted dozens of
large files, ect, and nothing will make it run faster.
does this have anything to do with the disk cleanup and
defrager not working? any idea how to fix this? do i need
to upgrade or something?

 

[Guest]

STEP 1

Download, install, and UPDATE the following programs:

Spybot-S&D (http://spybot.safer-networking.de/)
AND (it's AND, not OR)
Ad-aware (http://www.lavasoftusa.com/)

Restart computer in Safe Mode (see Help(F1) for more
information), and scan it using both programs.


STEP 2

Low transfat and low carb diet for your pc or How to
optimize Windows XP for the best performance:

http://home.earthlink.net/~rikhardk/How to optimize%
20Windows%20XP%20for%20the%20best%20performance.htm

or

http://www.rikhard.com (link in the middle)

Always keep antivirus and spy removal applications (links
on the bottom of the page) up-to-date, and scan regularly.

 

[Guest]

I am having the exact same problem as Jason - got to my machine this morning, tried start work as usual (closed the Norton Virus Scan from overnight), but the machine was running so slow that I thought I needed to do a Disc Cleanup only to find that the Disc Cleanup resulted in a CPU Usage = 100% message and nothing seemed to be happening. All programs on or off line are 10x slower than usual. I have Spybot S&D on this machine and ran a scan as recently as a few days ago. I've updated Norton Int. Sec. 2004 via live update and Norton AV 2004 via live update, checked for the Sasser worm (came back negative) and more - still can't speed the machine up. Any help beyond that suggested already would be greatly appreciated. Thank
S