NOOBIE said:
um no i havent ran check disk as i dont know what it is? but when the comp is going slow i hear alot of hardrive noise like its continuesly trying to look for something. i havent had any loss of data
Lots of Hard Disk Noise???!!! Hmmmm....Seems like you will need to run a check disk for your computer to see if you have any errors or not.
Run the check disk for every partition, and it is recommended that you stop all other running programs while doing so. Right click the partition, choose properties, then choose the tools tab, and click on check now under the error-checking section.
If you are using WinXP, you will see 2 options:
1. Automatically fix file systems errors
2. Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors
The first option is sceduled in your next windows restart, it won't be performed immediately, while the second one will be performed immediately.
If you have win98 or winME as a second operating system in your PC, I recommend that you perform the scandisk there, it's much more better than this dummy scan disk of the winXP as it goes through all the clusters of the partition and marks the bad sectors, if any, so that they are not used to store any data on. But beware, it takes time, a lot of it.
After you finish your Scan Disk, perform the Defragment as mentioned by elmarcorulz.
I don't think you will be experiencing any more slowness after this