Don't know what the heck is going on. Whenever I try to play a game, the system intermittently slows down, and my game along with it. It doesn't matter whether the game is recent or 10 years old. I attempted to play StarCraft earlier, whose only requirements are a Pentium 90 MHz processor and 16 MB of RAM, and the problem still occured.

I'm running Windows XP with a Pentium 4 1.7 GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM. I have a NVidia GeForce 2 graphics card, which should be more than enough for what I need. I've got a 70 GB hard drive, with 40 GB free space.

I ran Lavasoft Ad-Aware and Spy Bot Search & Destroy to get rid of all spyware/adware, cleaned out the registry, ran Norton Anti-Virus, which found nothing, and shut down all unnecessary system processes. Nothing seems to help.

I'm clean out of ideas here, and I've been racking my brain for days. Any suggestions?

---Tony

Its a long-shot but Disk Defrag? often on a cluttered disk a 20% performance increase in harware intensive games can be found! Other than that I would say increasing the RAM for the system but the problem is happening for all of your games - unless you have something eating the RAM away without you realising....

Yeah, I tried a Defrag too. 512 MB should be more than enough for what I'm doing.

All I can think of is that there is some rogue program doing stuff that I can't find in Task Manager.

I had that problem recently, and started looking real hard at the processes running in the background. It turns out that there were either duplicate processes (that were rogue operations -- with a one character difference in the name of the file) or rogue processes that were really official looking. I guess I should have known earlier.

Was suprised that alot of my spyware / antivirus software caught almost none of them. hmmm.....

Yeah...but check that out. Might help a little (It did for one of my PCs)

The other is still chugging at the Sims 2....so my guess is as good as yours.

do you have your xp cd? make a new partition (a small one) and svae all your important stuff on it, then reformat your pc, if you have very little to save use a cd to burn on

Success! It seemed to be some sort of cooling malfunction. My fans were choked up with dust. All is now well.

well done! never saw that coming! you could always get some bigger fans, maybe with an LED - you could grind a 120mm fan hole or even then get some more fans! good airflow will help to reduce the dust - and keep it cooler