In the last week, my computer has started to freeze quite frequently. Also, all webpages take about 30 seconds to 1 minute to load, which is quite strange. I have run a series of virus scans, only to come up with nothing. I realize my computer is quite old, but this sudden behaviour is quite strange. Any suggestions?

Could be that the Capacitors on your motherboard are leaking.
Check out badcaps.net
Time for a new Motherboard if it's quite old. Should be cheap on ebay.

Not all malware are viruses. This is all your AV program will look for. There are thousands of malicious programs that work in a similar manner to viruses. These are known as Adware and Spyware.

At the top of this forum page you will find a link to useful links. Try getting Ad-Aware and Spybot Search & Destroy. scanning with these may make a world of difference.

I should've mentioned that I have Adaware 6 and ran it. Nothing seems to have turned up running that either.

Yep, Ad-Aware & SpyBot are well worth a shot.

For starters though I would try IE repair because it might not be malware/viruses at all.

Copy/Paste this in the Run box then run it offline:
rundll32 setupwbv.dll,IE6Maintenance

If you are still using IE5 then substitute 5 for 6. I'm kinda assuming you use IE.

DerekW

I tried an Internet Explorer repair without success. My webpages still take forever too load, and the computer still freezes (although it seems to freeze less since the repair). I have also noticed that since my original post, I am unable to burn CD's in my CD-Rom. Every time I try, it gets to about 4%, freezes there and then finally fails to burn. The increasing number of seperate problems I seem to encounter, lead me to believe that it is time to dip in to the ol bank account and get a new computer (this ol' thing isn't even worth upgrading). Thanks for the tips folks. Any further suggestions are still appreciated.

One more aspirin that is always worth a shot:

Shut down and resart in MS-DOS mode then type scanreg /fix (hit Return key). This will rebuild your current registry and will help if it happens to be a registry problem.

Type exit (hit Return) to restart Windows.

Make sure your temporary internet files are cleared out. Might as well run defrag too.

DerekW