Does it do this when you first turn on your computer, or does it take a while to start doing it??? or is it all the time...

Anyway, I go on looking into possible software/hardware issues.

After you finish defrag; turn off virtual memory before you defrag your C: drive, if pagefile.sys is on C:... it will keep defrag from working properly..

(are you able to monitor the CPU temperature? What brand "make/model" CPU, intel/amd etc.. Get Motherboard monitor... With motherboard monitor, you can monitor the CPU temperature real time; or close to it.. It's important to keep the CPU load temperature below the Thermal throttling threshold, to preven the CPU from slowing down automatically.... Check if it has thermal throttling and if you find out that it is thermal throttling; based on CPU temperature being too hot.... Check the CPU cooling fan for lots of dust (you should check for dust anyway, maybe two, three times a year, if not more.. depending on the environment where the PC is located.. If you can't do it yourself, take it to a decent PC repair/service tech and tell them to dust it out for cheap.. You may not have to take it in that often for dusting..

I kept an eye on my GPU cooling fan/heatsink dust buildup and it seams, in my room, low pile carpetting, low foot traffic, it takes about 3 months to get a layer of dust that I think is "too much"

Blockage of the cooling fins with dusts=premature hardware failure due to overheating.

Check the powersupply cooling fan for dust, these can get pretty dusty...

Remove dust if you find it.... Use grounding strap/anti-static best practices, bare feet/tile floor.. unplugged from the outlet, if you are barefoot; etc.. if not, leave it plugged in, but the switch turned OFF.. so there is a path to ground for static....

Use canned air, or a clean reversable shop vac "not recommended", or a strong "puhh" breath of air, where you make the P sound, with your lips, it builds air pressure, strong enough to remove loose dust "also not recommended, unless you can do this without blowing bits of saliva onto the electricals"... If there is dust caked on, use a stiff bristled brush to gently knock it loose, carefull not to dislodge any electrical components or when going between the fan blades on the CPU heatsink; do not to twist, or lever on any of the fan blades with the brush, but stick the brush head down in there far enough to contact the dust bunnies and turn the fan so the brush rubs off the dust, then blow the dislodged dust out of the fins...


I think any of the newer AV/Security apps can be sort of resource hogs; Some computers it works fine, others have issues, most of the time it's software competing for resources, like one application wants address space yadayada, but AV application has it hooked, and requests "does this application have permission" so it's more CPU cycles, but better to be safe.. Just be sure that you only have ONE antivirus application installed and running at any given time.. You can try more than ONE antivirus application, but ensure that the previous one is completely uninstalled "unplugged from the net in the meantime"

If you have symantec set to automatically update, you may have got a new AV/SEP update that evening, then had it installed and gone into effect after restarting/coming back to the CPU..

Also, slow to do things, open files and play video's could be due to not enough available system ram "this includes virtual memory" which is located on your disk drive..

Open system restore... Try restoring your computer to thursday if you have an available restore point....

If you can't do a recent restore point.. and have changed too many applications from the available restore points..

Go ahead and turn off system restore and then restart your computer..

I don't recommend using system restore.. get a good backup program like Acronis true image, then use an external backup drive to image your computer to; and keep it updated..

Compare free hard drive space NOW and after restarting, with restore turned off, did it change? 1 gig more 2 gig more? Turn it back on and make a new restore point, even if your computer is too slow... although, only turn it off, if you do not have a valid restore point..


Incase any of the new fix suggestions bork your computer..... I am not responsible :P

I don't like symantec virus programs, or norton, or mcaffee.. I think windows DEP, combined with Avira and spybot search and destroy, with the occassional use of crap cleaner, and mbam would be better in regards to conserving resources and protecting against computer nasties.....

That and configuring your computer for best performance, using online guides; regarding services, things that don't need to be running etc etc.. And backup's.. do it..

Judy is right, many times, the only way to free up your disk space is to remove some of the things that you do not use on a regular basis....

Buy an external backup disk drive "big one" for relatively cheap, then put stuff on it.. move stuff off your system drive, that isn't needed to run the computer, or your applications, or the work that you are doing on your computer.

This will free up a big chunk of the hard drive, and leave plenty of room for the reserved space for virtual memory,trashbin and system restore....

Virtual memory default reserves part of your hard drive..

The recommended setting is a "fixed page file size"

Minimum and maximum of 1.5 times your installed ram, so if you have 2 gb of ram, that's 3072 MB of hard drive space, set asside for Virtual memory.. Reconsider the maximum size if you are using GIANT video's 4+GB per file etc, then you will want to have virtual memory set to the biggest file size that you are most likely to encounter while working with things like video capture/encoding..

Then there's a percentage of Hard drive space reserved for the "trashbin" have you emptied out your trashbin lately, all your temp files? look into crap cleaner "Ccleaner", to see if you can use it to clean some of the "crap" off the drive.... No offence meant, that's just the name of the program and what it's designed to do.. reset your Trashbin drive percentage to like a small percentage, plus or minus 150MB; I don't think of the trash bin as something usefull, except for taking a chunk of hard drive space..... It's IDENTICAL to a storage folder, with restricted access... I instead back up my files, then decide which files I want to keep on my computer, then I delete stuff, without using the trashbin, instead I have the "prompt" that asks if I want to delete; for sure etc...