XP slowing down

[Murugs]

Hello
I have a XP Home,P3,512 MB RAM machine at home.
Lat month I added the extra 256 MB to make it fast and it was very good.

But in the last week I see a huge amount of difference ..It takes more time to boot..Also I see a difference in surfing the internet..It is very slow.

I did a whole system anti virus check ..and no problem..
also in task manager I see too many svchost.exe..and one process called local service and other states network service
Is it this process causing to slow down..what measures should I start looking to make it faster.

regards
MP

 

[BernardStewart]

what virus scanner are you using - is it McAfee?

 

[Murugs]

Norton Antivirus

 

[urbankhaos]

Murugs,

Check that there are no spyware / malware applications running whilst connected to the net. These can be a huge drain on resources and can be viewed through process viewer in the task manager.

There are so many to look out for such as GMT.EXE (Gator) that it would be a nightmare to attempt to list them all.

I would suggest you attempt a system scan with Spybot Search and Destroy (available from download.com) and consider installing a personal firewall such as Zone Alarm (

http://www.zonelabs.com).

ZA allows you to monitor your net traffic 'realtime' and also allows you to see what is accessing the net and passing your demographic data across...

Hope this helps,

Urban.

 

[Murugs]

Urban
Thx for the post.
I installed spyware and detected some junk programs like search box etc and removed them..
Also I have a zone alarm firewall which monitors network traffic.

regards
MP