Acer 9411 AWSMi troubles

Hello, hope to find some help with my laptop from this forum. My Acer is slowing down badly. Sometimes it takes ten minutes or more to boot up. When it does and I click on to my email it will take twenty seconds to load. The program will show up with the files on the right side but the mail it self will take an additional ten to twenty seconds to load. Sounds are stuttering and video sounds are similar. I have been getting occasional freezes while surfing the internet too. Mouse seems to lag at times as well.
Before I go the the erecovery route I thought I'd try here to see if anyone has a similar problem. Defrag and scan disk have been done with no help. I don't have a lot of programs on the computer, ZoneAlarm, Avast, Picasa2, Google Earth and then most of what came with the program. I use the laptop for emails and surfing mostly, don't play games. Any suggestions would be appreciated. I also tried the windows key while tapping R and got some dxdiag which wasn't much help.
Edit to add, checking on windows task manager I see the system idle process uses 28k of memory but under the cpu column it goes back and forth from around 40 to as high as 94. Next highest cpu number is system which hit 09 but seems to hang more around 04, 05.
Thanks for any ideas.
Jon

 

Amazing; I have just started having the EXACT same trouble. Stuttering sounds, taking forever to boot, CPU usage exploding to 100% and staying there, etc.

I've tried several different things suggested on other websites so far, but haven't found any solutions yet. I am thinking that this has something to do with my Symantec antivirus/firewall.

I will add that this started very suddenly on or about July 27 or 28.

 

sounds like time to wave bye bye to Symantec,,, AVG 8.0 free works great for me, but there are many other antivirus solutions that use less system resources than Symantec...

and as long as you have the FIREWALL built into windows enabled that should be enough especially if you are using a ROUTER with a firewall and NAT (network address translation) ***(which almost all firewalls have used for 5 or 10 years now)***

i find that the more i try to protect a system the more attention it draws from the DARK SIDE

 

I got rid of symantec two years ago. I thought maybe AVG might be the problem when I upgraded to 8.0 and went to Avast. Problem is in the start up and shutdown now. It takes ten minutes to start up. Once up and after the twenty seconds for Outlook Express to load it runs fairly well. I still don't have a clue. Added Glary Utilities and have run that and it still starts slow and shuts down slow. Adaware hasn't found anything nor has SuperAntiSpyware.