My laptop has slowed down

[Jamie 3]

Hi All,

I bought a laptop about 4 months ago with XP Home installed and i've noticed lately that my machine is really starting to slow down (its 1.7 ghz) and programs stop running regularly (i get a "Program not responding message") and i'm not sure what the problem is.

Here is some background

1) When i reboot, sometimes i get the following message
"Checking File system on C. The type of file system is fat 32. One of your disks need to be checked for consistency.

2) I constantly download files from Kazaa and often fall below 200mb left on my 20 GB Hard drive

3) I can leave my machine on for a few days at a time while downloading - by keeping windows media player on to stop it automatically turning off.

4) I have run Norton Antivirus over my whole system and it detected no viruses.

Pease Help!

[bailey]

make sure that the virus update it the latest update, and kaza is not running in the background, some files are infected that may be downloaded.I do not recommend useing kazaa at all.
if you must, use kazaa lite.

I have heard of this problem from many others.

[Jamie 3]

Thanks for the reply. Excuse my ignorance but what is Kazaa Lite? I thought Kazaa was just Kazaa. Also, Why don't you recommend Kazaa? and what would you recommend instead of Kazaa?

Thank you for your time.

[Steve1]

Jamie,

You might want to look into WinMX .

Kazaa is notorious for viruses and malware. WinMX is the file sharing program of choise now a days.

[Tuf]

I am certainly no fan of any filesharing program but at least KazaaLite has had the offensive code removed from it.

If you only have 200mb free on a 20 GB drive running windows that alone can cause a ton of problems. You might try running disk cleanup, emptying the Recycle Bin, cleaning out you restore files, and if that recovers enough space then defragmenting your hard drive. If you don't use the hibernation feature on your notebook disable that will gain you back some more.

It sounds like you really need a larger drive or at least burn some of it to CD. Personally I think you should try to keep at least twenty percent of a drive as freespace to let Windows do it's job. It may not need that much often but if you are unzipping large files often you'll need a bunch.