sony vaio updates

[monkey harris]

my sony vaio laptop has suddenly started to run like an asthmatic ant, i have Norton Anti virus which from reading posts could be the problem but it has always worked OK. i have run AdAware, Spy-bot etc and found nothing... start-up takes 10 times longer than normal but eventualy it calms down and behaves normal. however every 5 minutes it slows down to a sloathe pace for 20 seconds approx.. its as if something is eating up all the power but i have no idea.

i have defragged my C: drive which only has 3% space left but my D: drive is empty

Help please its driving me crazy!

[Trace--]

well having the C drive so full MIGHT be the problem. Then again you could have a program sucking all the juice out of the processor or your RAM. Heres what i suggest.

CTRL+ALT+DEL, to open Task Manager. hit the Processes tab and click the CPU column until you see the biggest numbers at the top. (System Idle Process is supposed to use all of the cpu it can.. thats how most cpu's stay cool. Dont worry about this.) See waht else comes up as a big juicer from the CPU. If it says 100% for that length of time, theres your problem.

Same thing for RAM usage. click the Mem Usage column bar until the biggest numbers are at the top, and watch it.

Best things i can think of. Good luck

[monkey harris]

thanks for your reply, all processes seem to be normal the only one using anything is idle process, once everything has started up (after 11 mins) it runs almost as it did apart from the fact things are slowed down every 10 mins or so.

i havent installed anything new or downloaded anything apart from a bit of music from iTunes.

thanks anyway