Laptop is terrifyingly slow- help please

[Trigger_happy]

Last month, I got a new Vista laptop for Uni. Its great, apart from its getting slower and slower. Today, it took like 30 minutes just to load up firefox, and it hangs constantly. Opening things like Music, or documents is cripplingly slow as well- it loads a blank box, which then fails to respond for a good 5 minutes, before then loading. As I'm typing this even, it hangs. And when I turned it on, for a good 5-7 minutes, it loaded just a black screen and my cursor.

I've done a scan with AVG and nothings come up. From the specs, it shouldn't be anywhere near this slow at all! Could it be a mechanical failure of some kind? I'm tempted to take it back under warranty and switch it for a new one.

Cheers.

[Dennis's Mom]

I had to ditch AVG because of how slowed down my laptop. I now use NOD and have had no slowdown issues.

When it's slow, open up the taskmanager and see what processes are hogging the resources, then type that process into a google search. I bet you dollars to donuts it's something AVG is doing.

[Trigger_happy]

Currently the top three are Firefox, at nearly 100,000k, dwm.exe at 23,000 and explorer.exe at 20,000.

[Trigger_happy]

Don't worry folks- I got the Vista SP 2 and fiddled around with the search indexing and it seems much quicker. Almost no hanging at all on Firefox.

[TRfan23]

Yeh what some people don't realize is SP's are heaven :)

If you like you can ditch AVG for Avira Free anti-virus or preferably Kaspersky anti-virus 2009.

[EscondeR]

If you run Diagnose.exe (http://www.tombraiderhub.com/download/diagnose.exe) and ARDiag.exe (http://www.tombraiderhub.com/download/ardiag.exe) and post both reports, we'll help you beat some more juice out of your laptop :)

BTW, Vista is bloatware. So within any circumstances it'll be slower than XP and of course 2003 on the same config.