PC slowing down, help

[UKBob]

Its 6 months old, nearly exactly the same in absolutely every way as my old PC, 3 ghz, 2 gigs ram, win xp home (I think)...

For some reason, windows seems to have a reduced reboot time. Whilst Ive always had 10+ ie windows open, I can now only manage a few (after 24 hours) and programs fail to open. A reboot sorts it out.

I know, its a long shot, and I dont expect anyone to have a solution, but are there any files which I might check for, or processes which might be running (malware, etc) which I can look at to determine whether or not they are affecting the pc. Feels rather like I have a memory leak, something is amis.

apps installed are norton, aaw, spybot, ie, oe, office, a few macromedia apps, PS CS being the newest/latest addition, firefox and a few other bits, thats about it.

Stumped... usually its taken years for a pc to get this bad before a fresh install is needed.

[Plotloss]

Norton isnt helping, its poorly coded, ineffectual and a resource hog. It also has no reason to put hooks quite that low down into the OS.

Get shot of it pronto and replace it with the AVG and Zonelabs combo.

Its a config issue, I run a machine thats probably only 10% as powerful as the spec on yours and can quite happily have a triple height taskbar full of windows and it still perform perfectly adequately. Process manager will tell you whats running and what memory and cpu its taking.

Also occasionally minimise all windows (show desktop) this causes each window to dump its active memory contents thus releasing it for other tasks.

[bigdods]

Norton and spybot two of the worst offenders out there. I have spybot but only turn it on to run a scan. If I leave it running in the toolbar my PC slows down massively. And norton is just a nightmare, hogs resources and processor.

Im running P4 3Ghz 1Gb RAM btw.

[UKBob]

I know norton is naff. And I will swap to avg at some point. But unless there is a line of poor code in the latest program update which causes a memory leak or some such, its not the problem.

Ive run PC's which were 1/10th the spec of my machine (its actually over than 3ghz... 3.2 or 3.4) which ran better than mine does not. I just wish I knew or had a way of knowing which program is sucking resources

It takes me 15 hours of my time to reinstall and set up an OS and all my apps again, and I just dont have that time right now.

[Wildfire]

Norton is PITA I found that after a certain length of time it starts using more and more resources. Try downloadign tuen up Utilities, it's free for 30 days, run the registry cleaner and registry defrag. Then down load PageFile Defrag and defrag your paging file. Get rid of Spybot's protection and just use it for scans.