I have a computer with specs close to yours p4 1.5ghz, and it uses the old RDRAM so I have even less memory cause I refuse to pay the prices for more memory for mine so I'm running 256mb, and I noticed that Firefox and IE 7 can use alot of memory and slow it down so you might want to check your processes and see how much memory you're using when you're surfing.
I've also experienced the cursor pausing; I'm suspecting it's due to lots of ads on sites, as my computer works fine for older 3D games. Is your computer slow offline or only online?

It seems to be jumping around all over the place. Usage shows anything from 14% to 100%. The usage graph shows a series of jagged spikes.

JAJansenJr
JAJansenJr@gmail.com

Well, if you're not doing anything on your computer and dont have any programs running in the back ground and it spikes like that often it dose sound like you have spyware or adware or some kind of nasty software running in the background. Cause if you have nothing running the computers not sopose to jump around like that. Thats my final conclusion on this is that you have some nasties and your comptuer might just be getting old lol. Try running some adware and spyware programs again and make sure they are up to date again i know you said you have done that. If that dont help you might want to just back up important documents and clean install.

Best Regards
Tech TJ

do yourself a favor and get a new computer

"I will have to look at your post but, no, have not run virus scans mentioned in this thread, as I have American Online Security Edition, which has a McAfee virus scanner and other security measures."

I would not place to much confidence in this combination; it may be a great virus scanner but I recently went to a customer's house that had 63 processes running and the computer was slowed down to a crawl; it was just sitting there on AOL, doing nothing and the page file was using around 500 mb, which is a problem if you only have 256! I know without a doubt it had spyware, because I saw one application running myself, and that was only the most obvious one!

I do not have the quote here, but Microsoft admits that malware is so advanced today that IT IS VERY POSSIBLE FOR IT TO GET PAST YOUR ANTIVIRUS software, because it is impossible for the antivirus software to have signatures for every malware there is. So you can deal with this by looking through the processes yourself (and even this can be tricky because malware can be named after legitimate processes), running MULTIPLE anti-virus and other malware programs (remember to use one for trojans) or if you find that this is too time-consuming and feel your computer is still too slow, backup your files and reinstall XP, as some people have already advised.

I agree with the posters who think your problem is malware, because of the CPU activity. The only other thing that I know of that would help speed it up is increasing RAM, but you might as well buy another used system that doesn't use RDRAM if you're going to take that approach and you should still rule out the malware first.

Very Good Post that put everything in this thread and its all 100% good advice and correct. There is all the answers that can be given to you.

Very Good Job explodinghead75 alot of kudos for you.

Best Regards
Tech TJ

Microsoft has a support webcast at

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/823887

which addresses Performance Tuning issues in Windows XP. I haven't tried everything they suggest but as this webcast came out in 2003 it's apparent that Microsoft has realised as of quite some time ago that there are real performance tuning issues in XP.

There is a lot of good information here and I recommend anyone facing slowness issues take a look.

At the moment things are running better, mainly after shutting down indexing services running in the background. It was interesting to see just how long it took for the shutdown process took to complete - virtually every file on my F partition was accessed and that took a while.

This "slowness" issue is something I will be looking at carefully when I next upgrade or replace my system.

Any additional ideas anyone may have are still welcome. Every step to getting the system to run promptly is helpful and welcome.

JAJansenJr
JAJansenJr@gmail.com

do you know that xp can be tweaked to run using only 48mb ram. Fine for a low-spec PC that you could donate to an elderley relative.

48 Meg RAM. Interesting that XP can run with that small amount. I have 384 Meg RDRAM.
One can only wish that more capability was built into the operating system to permit automatic configuration for smooth running for the RAM you have. Tweaking by trial and error can eventually work, but the time spent in doing this is overhead to doing something you really wish or need to be doing.

OS developers of the world! Write more intelligent operating system code so that the befuddled end user can get things to work!

Any further suggestions anyone may have are sincerely welcome. XP has many nooks and crannies and I'm sure that there are other things that may be tried.

JAJansenJr
JAJansenJr@gmail.com

the machine actually had 64mb ram (min for windows to install) but i tweaked the servcies so that task manager reported that windows was only using 44mb of it

basically everything went off apart from basic networking, RPC and logging (else the system doesnt boot)