Over the last few weeks i have noticed that my computer has been acting rather sluggish. At first i suspected spyware or some virus and ran my usual security programs: Ad-aware Se, AVG Anti-Virus, Anti-vir antivirus, spybot, and avast. I found nothing however. I am aware that my 512 ram can hardly be expected to give me top performance but i am having to wait 5 minutes for my computer to boot up. I have gone into msconfig and removed the unwanted checkmarks. I have the zone alarm client, webshots, antivir and tweak Ui currently starting up. Also after boot i am having to wait 60 seconds before my firefox browser opens up. Before this sluggishness i used to wait about 5-6 seconds. Can anyone please please suggest something to cure this. Perhaps a ram boosted program that is reliable or a good tune-up utility. Also when i go into my windows security center, i get this warnoing that my firewall and antivirus are not enabled when i have a fully functional avg antivirus and zone alarms enabled. Does anyone know why that may be. If anyone wants i can pst a hijack this log. Thanks.

Hit Ctrl-Alt-Del & see what the CPU usage percentage is...click the processes tab to see what program is gobbling it up

MNy cpu usage is about 278. There are no programs that are taking up a lot of resources I have explore.exe taking up 39,968kb and Firefox taking up 51,828kb and vsmon.exe taking up 20,388 kb

"MNy cpu usage is about 278" That's very high - considering that usage is a percentage and cannot exceed 100 Look again? I'm not one of those who think Bill Gates is the devil. I simply suspect that if Microsoft ever met up with the devil, it wouldn't need an interpreter.

I imagine everything and it's brother is starting up.

How To: Determine what Services are running in Windows XP http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/ser... http://www.worldstart.com/tips/tips...

Use HiJackThis to track down or check for possible infections. Read this link 1st, it has step by step. http://www.wilderssecurity.com/show... Important: Create a specific folder on your hard drive called HijackThis to keep its backups. You can do this by going to My Computer (Windows key+e) then double click on C: then right click and select New then Folder and name it HijackThis. Download and unzip HijackThis.exe into this folder. http://www.merijn.org/downloads.html Or, http://tomcoyote.com/hjt/ If possible run HJT in Normal mode ( not Safe ) with all your normal startup's working. HijackThis Tutorial - How to Analyse your own log. http://spywarewarrior.com/viewtopic... http://hometown.aol.co.uk/jrmc137/h... http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tut... http://www.malwarehelp.org/understa... HijackThis log file analysis ( online ) http://hijackthis.de/index.php?lang... Or, http://startup.networktechs.com/pag... http://hjt.iamnotageek.com Malware Prevention: Prevent Re-infection http://wiki.castlecops.com/Malware_...