Computer running very slow

Hi everyone has you could see from my last post my laptop is down with a bad mother board so I’m stuck with using my parents home computer. This computer is a dell running windows xp with a 2 GHz processor with 512 MB of ram, which a just upgraded. I've already gone into the system properties and adjusted the performance for the best possible. I have also gone into the administrative tools and disabled all the services that are not need, and cleaned up the rest with msconfig. So I only have the minimum running with zonealarm security suite running for protection. Even with all of this done it still takes to long for a simple folder to open up or to open a small application. So my question, is there any thing I can do to speed up this computer that I haven't already done and/or could it be possible that something is wrong with the hardware of this computer making it run slower.



Ps. I’ve been watching how much resource programs are using with process explorer from sysinternals. I've noticed that Hardware interrupts is a lot of the times the process that is taking up must of the processing power...which I can't ever recall seeing before.

Failing Hardrive????

I have seen systems slow down when the harddrive is starting to go....

Have you run chkdsk???

MLF

how many processes are you running when you get into task mananger? it should be on the bottom left corner of task manager. also in task manager when you click on "performance" the right side it says " total memory and available memory" a rule of thumb I have always been told is that available memory should be around half of total memory. how how is your CPU useage? have you cleared your cookies/cache etc?

I only have 20 processes running, like i said I’ve turned off every thing i don't need running. The failing hard drive also crossed my mine, but when i checked it every thing turned up ok. I also have cleared the cache.

this might sound like a kinda simple answer but I would suggest checking the whole PC for dust. if dust gets inside the case it can REALLY slow things down. same thing goes if your CPU is getting too hot. I would check those 2 things out if I were you.

Howdy.

Have you given the computer a complete scan with your Av, Spyware etc in safemode?
Also have you defregmented the hard drive..?

I am going to guess that maybe the ram is on it's way, and it wouldn't hurt to do a chkdsk on the hard drive while your at it. ;)

also could it be possible that you have disabled a needed option while you were disabling things?

cheers
f2B

Hi everyone, i ran chkdsk again and this time it did find the hard drive to be bad. Very strange how it didn't find this a few weeks ago when it started to act up. Thanks for all the help that everyone provided.