I didn't know spyware, etc. had been ruled out as a problem...sorry about posting in the wrong place. As requested, I downloaded the cpu-z program and ran it. What do you want to know from its report? When it first opens, the processor core speed is clocked at 1654, but then almost immediately drops to 530.0 mhz. It seems to recognize the full 768 mb of ram.

Thats what i wanted to know it it read it right and then changed .not sure whats going on ,but i remember we had someone with the same problem awhile back but cant remember what fixed it ,or if it got fixed .
Getting back to spyware ,or virus ,have you check computer for both .
start with this .
Run at least 2 of these !
http://housecall.trendmicro.com/
http://www.kaspersky.com/scanforvirus.html
http://www.pandasoftware.com/actives..._principal.htm
http://www.ravantivirus.com/scan/
http://www.bitdefender.com/scan/licence.php

Then post back any results

Do you have a computer or laptop? Because some laptops use Intel Mobile Proccessors which slows your CPU to whatever CPU speed is needed to run a program, it save's battery, when you idle on windows it will run at 200 something MHz, what kind of CPU do you have? Im gonna go ahead and say open a program that will need to run around 1 GHz, and check on what it reads out, hopefully it'll be simple as that.

My reasoning in that regard was:

A) While viruses, spyware, etc. can certainly cause sluggishness/slowdowns, they cause that behaviour because they "hog" available system resources (CPU time and memory), not because they throttle back the speed at which your processor is running.

B) Although a clean HJT log does not necessarilly mean that you have no infections, your log is clean.


Since your HJT log also indicates that we are dealing with a laptop here, if you're really seeing a drop in actual clock speed it's much more likely due something like power management than malicious infections.

Any ideas on power management items that may be causing my problem? Also, does anyone have any ideas why registry mechanic fixes the problem, but the problem does not stay fixed. I have to run registry mechanic EVERY time I boot up my computer, then it runs fine. This is time consuming and, well, annoying. Any thoughts?

We should get some specific info to narrow this down:


- When did this start happening, and you had you made any hardware or software adds/removes/upgrades just before that (upgrading to SP2, for example)?

- Once you run Reg Mech at startup, the CPU does not slow down again until the next boot, right?

- Does Reg Mechanic give any you any report of what it has fixed? If it does, there may be clues in that report. Post any possibly helpful info that you can get from that.

- When you "turn off" the laptop, do you do a true Shut Down, or do you put it in Sleep or Hibernate mode?

- Whichever mode you use to turn off the laptop, test each of the other two modes and tell us whether or not CPU speed has decreased afer you bring the machine back to life from each of those modes.

- Give us the exact model number and age of the laptop, as well as the make and version of the BIOS.