Win2K severe slowdown

[Bones]

I would be grateful if someone could give me advice on the following:

Starting up and using my PC presents no problems, however it soon
begins to slow down. Its quite subtle at first, but within 30 mins,
the system is unusable, even the pointer will stop for a minute at at
time.

A restart will take several times longer, and even the login screen is
very unresponsive. From the restart to getting everything in the
system tray loaded can take over half an hour! Turn it off, and the
next day it starts all over again.

I removed a worm a couple of days before, and had no problems
afterwards, but havn't been able to get the virus checker to operate
during the slowdown. It has been suggested that my PC might be
overheating, but the CPU is 50c and the system is 39c during the
problems (within parameters for a Duron 850).

I'm running Win2k SP4, 850 Duron, 256 Meg RAM.

Any suggestions gratefully received.

Thanks

 

[Greedo]

Seems a bit obvious, but what does Task Manager report? - is anything
hogging all the CPU? (Ctrl+Shift+Esc, look at middle tab, "Processes", click
on column header "CPU" to sort by its %age).

Or it might be worth checking the Event Viewer (during the early stages,
before it's ground to a halt).

Don't like the sound of the worms - are you sure they're all gone?

And maybe check for nasties with Adaware and/or Spybot S&D (both free).

HTH

 

[Bones]

Spybot seems to have fixed it.

Many thanks for your help.

Bones

 

[Shane]

It sounds like you've already considered this, but I had
the same problem and removed a worm just previously, too.
Even though the worm was gone, I had some corrupted files.
So, while I don't know if this is the best way to fix,
here's what I did and it seems to have solved that
particular problem. Once, I did a full scan and made sure
the worm was gone, I tried a repair of 2000. That failed
so I had to do a reinstall of the operating system. I know
that sucks, especially if you have a seasoned system, but
I couldn't get anything else top take care of it.

You might also take a look at the amount of RAM, though
I'm sure you've thought of this too, but it seems like a
lot of programs are keeping some portion resident in the
memory area (Even when they've been uninstalled and
politely asked to leave!). Just some thoughts from the
peanut gallery.