Hey, My pc isnt too old and has been running smoothly for over a year now. However i've suddenly been getting serious lag. First of all, looking at the task manager, after opening windows explorer for example, it can spike up from 2% to 50-60%. The huge jump in usage only occurs when i open a new process, if the computer is idle it sits between 0%-2% CPU usage. Also when i try play an MP3 file using windows media player, it jumps from 0-2 to 50-60 for a sec, and comes down to 10-20%. Eventhough the usage goes down, the sound does lag as well, pretty badly sometimes. Other than that, booting up window takes an additional 1-2 mins. Im not too sure what caused the problem but hopefully someone can point me in the right direction. I dont recall downloading any new programs before this occured. Another problem i get is while playing online games, such as World of Warcraft, after ALT-Tabbing out of the game and back in, the textures are completely gone, for example a green grass texture im standing on becomes invisible and fps drops to unplayable numbers, so i have to reboot my computer. Not too sure how to describe this problem well, so sorry. What i've done so far is a full AVG scan, spybot search & destroy scan, ad-aware scan, a memory test(memtest86.com) and i defragment the drive as well.(all 3 drives have over 15GB of free space). I've also updated my onboard sound drivers(Realtek) and updated my graphic card drivers as well. However the problem is there. My pc specs are : intel core 2 duo 6300 @ 1.86MHz 1GB Ram Geforce 7600 GT I've suspected my processor fan, however i cleaned it up, and checked the temps, and it was 49 before i cleaned it, and 40 after i cleaned it. But even after tat the problem remained. Would appreciate any sort of help or comments to point me in the right direction. Thank you in advanced.

6yxx, SWAG, what you describe makes me think of a nasty. Know you scanned with an AV, but suspect a Trojan. Be aware that a virus and a Trojan are similar, but not the same. Many times, an AV detects one it can't clean , other times, it gets missed entirely. If you need to clean one, Superantispyware can do the job and you can get it free @: http://www.superantispyware.com/ among other places. They have a Vista compatible version if needed. If it turns out that you need to use it, be sure to update prior to running. They just released a new update recently and it changes all the time. Things are in a constant state of flux. HTH. Ed in Texas.

hey guys, i remembered something while i was trying to go to bed yesterday. a week ago i was surfing the net, and suddenly my home electricity got cut off for 2 secs, restarting my computer. It then went to the XP loading screen and couldnt get pass through it, and restarted again. This occured 3 times before it finally entered windows. Starting from that day until now, the lag problems have gradually increased. So im now assuming that electricity black out might have shocked something in my computer? Now im not too sure on how electricity and motherboards work, but seeing that my computer can still start up, i can still load windows and even surf the net, am i safe to assume my motherboard is in perfect condition? If this is the problem behind my lag issue, i was wondering if anyone can point me in the right direction of diagnosing each hardware 1 by 1 and finding out which one needs to be replaced. Thanks in advanced.

Oh and thanks Ed for the recommendation, but after scanning it, i did find a few tracing cookies, but after removing em, still no go. Still had the lag with me. :( thanks tho.