So lately my computer has become real sluggish. Like when I open up an application, everything slows down and my mouse becomes jerky. Sometimes it will go thru this cycle where every 2 seconds it will stop for a split second while the hard drive light comes on…very annoying, especially during games.
I dont recall it behaving this way before… and Ive tried everything I can think of. I’ve defraged, scanned for viruses & spyware. For the record I have XP pro running at 1 GHz with 192 megs of ram. Thanks!
Probably fragmented pagefile.sys
Defragmenting the system does not defragment to pagefile.sys. Just yesterday, after experiencing what you describe for weeks, I checked mine out. 144M pagesfile with 155 fragments!! You may use the disk defragmenter’s analysis report to determine how fragmented it is. Since I have one disk, I used a really scary program called “PageDefrag” by Mark Russinovich at www.sysinternals.com. I say scary because after one booting, the system told me I didn’t have a pagefile.sys, and it ran horribly. After rebooting, things were good. If you have two hard drives, move the pagefile.sys to another disk to defragment it, then make sure it lives on your non-system disk.
Thanks for your recommendation, NotMrKnowItAll. I’ll give it a try.