My computer is working slower and slower. My Norton Antivirus is current and a scan shows clean. Ad-Aware, Spybot, and Spy Sweeper show me clean. However, programs are taking longer to start. I notice this especially online, when sites can take up to a minute to load. I have a cable modem, which initially was quite fast, and I live in an ethnic residential neighborhood, so at least during the day I should have nobody else fighting me for access. Even my computer clock is slowed down. Two days ago I set it. Last night it was 17 minutes behind.
Help?
If your computer clock is slowing down, you need a new clock battery. However, that fact shouldn’t impact the speed of the rest of your system unless the weak battery is making your BIOS forget its settings and leaving you in some weird state.
Just for starters------------
It’s probably slowing because it’s cluttered with junk that you don’t want and haven’t used since hector was a pup—or don’t need-------stuff you don’t even know is in there. .
Go to run/misconfig/atartup and blow out every thing that’s there.
Call up your C drive and dump every item that that you recognize as useless or no longer wanted.[if it’s shown as in a fiole leave it alone]
Go to ‘temporary internet files’ and dump the whole shebang.[do tnis once a week—or even every day.
Go to "deleted mail and permanently delete the lot.
Some of these may be unecessary .but it’s fun to be in control once in a while.
EZ
If you have NEVER cleaned out your temp. internet file it may take a
l- o- n -g time for it to complete----just kick back and wait it out.
Defrag your hard drive.
if your machine offers a "compress"feature-do it----but pick a free afternoo to do it!
make sure the hampster has enough food and water and that the hampster wheel inside the computer has been properly lubed. 
Not necessarily true. I have a K62-500 running Win98 (don’t laugh) that I sometimes run emule on. The combination of Win9x with the way emule was programmed mean my computer becomes a bit laggy, and the system clock actually does slow down. Badly enough that I set the Windows Scheduler to sync time with my Linux server twice a day. If I’m not running it (most of the time, in fact), then the clock keeps great time.
So it is possible that software is affecting your system clock. Unfortunately I don’t have any tips on just what it might be.