Mysterious Performance issue M1330

Hi,

I've had my M1330 since June/July and just recently (i.e. a few days ago) it's been slowing down A LOT.
I haven't installed anything lately and I doubt it's a virus or some other malicious software because I've been running Grisoft's Antivir the whole time and my browsing habits don't make me extrememly prone to trojans and whatnot.
I've installed adaware to check if anything's wrong, I've installed Tuneup utilities to check if anything was wrong, I ran a disk check via Tuneup as well. I've uninstalled programs which I haven't used.
And after all of that, it's gotten even worse!!! CPU performance rises to 50+% when using firefox for example. At startup, (I used to have no problems whatsoever), the CPU jumps up to 100%!
I'm sort of tapped out since I don't know what else to do.
I'm running Vista SP1, BIOS A12.
Specs are in the sig,
I'll appreciate ANY help!!!

 

its just your OS getting full of junk, there are some things that you can remove only by formatting and re-installing, witch is what i would suggest, i usually reformat my lappy twice a year ( got it in july, and ive already done it once.... so thats my advice... )

 

Oh man, that's so lame!
I even went through the entire NBR Vista guide before actually using this lappy.
Guess I might have to resort to vLite.
Is vLite compatible with an OEM version of Vista?

 

Reformat twice a year! That's overkill. Try CCleaner first to see if it improves. Could also be your Tuneup program is working in the background and/or the antivirus is doing a scan of your HDD. Also try to disable startup programs in 'msconfig'

 

It could be that a change in the die of the CPU causes it heating up. Or the GPU thermal pad being worn out. In both cases Dell's thermal protection will kick in and slow down your processing speed.

There are two independent throtteling mechanisms used by Dell namely Thermal Monitor 1 (TM1) and TM2. There are only very few tools that can detect TM1 and TM2 kicking in. One of the tools is RMClock 2.35. Don't change anything in the tool, just launch it and click monitoring.

This is how TM2 kicking in looks like:


TM1 kicking in looks different and can hardly be detected by other tools. In this case the purple and red bars on top differ. The red bar is the actual core clock. The purple bar is the core clock after substracting the idle CPU cycles put in by TM1. That means: If the bars differ (you'll also see in the graph next to it), then TM1 kicks in and slows down your CPU speed.