System crawls at unpredictable times

[howldog]

New to XP after being on 98 and ME for years.

At various times of the working day, for unknown reasons, my XP
computer (a compaq presario with XP home edition) will, for some
reason, act lethargic beyond belief.

Something system-wise has kicked in, and I cant tell what it is.

I'm wondering if it is defragging, altho no window ever appears. I've
used the task manager but cannot tell from the list of encrypted
processes, what is causing the slow-down.

It also could be Norton systemworks doing something.

In 98 and XP, I could specify at what intervals, if any, i wanted the
machine to defrag, and i set it for overnight. I cannot find that on
XP. It seems to do its maintenance work whenever it wants.

Is there a way to force the system to do scandisc and defrag overnight
instead of during the day?

thank you

 

[Jupiter Jones [MVP]]

Go to Scheduled Tasks. in Control Panel.
From there you can schedule.

Also perform the steps on this link:
http://www3.telus.net/dandemar/slowcom.htm

 

[howldog]

Go to Scheduled Tasks. in Control Panel.
From there you can schedule.

Also perform the steps on this link:
http://www3.telus.net/dandemar/slowcom.htm

thank you.

I did not see Defrag in the scheduled tasks. I suppose I could add it
manually....

 

[Guest]

New to XP after being on 98 and ME for years.

At various times of the working day, for unknown reasons, my XP
computer (a compaq presario with XP home edition) will, for some
reason, act lethargic beyond belief.

Something system-wise has kicked in, and I cant tell what it is.

I'm wondering if it is defragging, altho no window ever appears. I've
used the task manager but cannot tell from the list of encrypted
processes, what is causing the slow-down.

It also could be Norton systemworks doing something.

In 98 and XP, I could specify at what intervals, if any, i wanted the
machine to defrag, and i set it for overnight. I cannot find that on
XP. It seems to do its maintenance work whenever it wants.

Is there a way to force the system to do scandisc and defrag overnight
instead of during the day?

thank you

It could be the indexing service starting up?

 

[howldog]

It could be the indexing service starting up?

OK, what exactly is that?

another thing i dont quite understand, when i went to schedule a new
task, i could not find SCANDISK.

is there not a scandisk function for XP?