my xp pro used to strt earlier within 2 booting lines, my system crashed and sudenly my xp pro now consumes 7 to 8 lines and even my windows explorer is giving me strange problems like if i have to scroll down a folder with 30 files, i find my screen and fonts scrambled , and even my webpages when scrolling down shows same paragraphs one below the other for a while( i guess the windows explorer refresh rate has fallen down very sharply)i tried increasing the priority of explorer to above normal but still of no use, i got a huge swapfile(800mb on the same drive as my OS), overall my windows has slowed down , indexing service is OFF, windows xp set to consume least memory , more processor priority to programs , and im on LAN, please help regards vishnu

Basic housekeeping questions. Have you emptied out temp internet files folder? Have you done disk cleanup/defrag? have you checked for trojans/spyware that can slow down everything? Have you looked in taskmanager to see what processes are running and consuming your cpu resources? You're on a LAN. What else is on your network? could your system be bogging down with traffic on the network? Forgive this if you have already checked out these things.

...and have you checked your memory modules for a problem ? FACT : 80% of people on earth are stupid...19% play themselves smart..the 1% are WE...and we kick ass baby!

thanx for the speedy replies yes i have checked my system for temp files/defrag/task manager/startup/hidden proscesses/trojans/virus/ and im on secure lan/ i had serious problem with my memory before, it suddenly seems to show (non-spd)on one of my 3 sticks, as i have posted that problem here before, i did lots of permutation and combination with those sticks and even updated my Bios, even system restore does not work,, i suspect my RAM, but is there any way i can repair my windows refresh rate? my applications run fast, when i burn cds i see my memory being used optimally(all the three sticks work) , did some ram testing at bootup, no problem found. my processor temp is constantly at 75-80 centigrade, does that decrease my windows performance( p4 1.5 gh, 256 L2 cache), DMA enabled, right now im playing with my graphix drivers, (32 MB savage3d), suddenly my ststem seems to run well but again within few minutes its gets slowed, i can see when applications turn from minimize to full screen, they seems to run very slow, and when i have lots of files in my folder( this is my main concern) their names seems to overlap or for a while part of the screen looks frozen , looks like the refresh rate has slowed down . . i seems to notice this only after i upgraded my BIOS, (intel 845wn with latest available bios) regards vishnu

A processor temperature of 75-80degC is way too high on a P4. Mine runs fine at 35 with only the standard retail HSF and one extra casefan. You need to seriously look a cooling. A 32mb vga card should be adequate but you would also benefit from an upgrade. You say you have done some ram testing at bootup. Have you checked your ram using memtest86. A quick googlesearch will find it. Download it and run the exe with a formatted clean floppy in the drive. It creates a bootdisk which you then use to boot and run memory testing routine. Let it run overnight and if errors are reported then retest one stick of ram at a time to determine which stick/sticks are faulty. Solve your heat/ram problems and maybe your graphics will improve.