T43 slow to open up Internet Explorer window

My T43 is now suddenly slowing down. I defragment the hard drive once a day. My power cord is plugged in almost all the time. I've got 1.25 gb of ram.

It takes about 10-15 seconds to open a new Internet Explorer window. What's going on??

Has my computer been hijacked by something? What could be causing the slowdown?

My T43 has a 1.73 Pentium M, it was quite speedy until now.

 

Defragmenting once a day? Are you insane?

Run the standard virus/malware tests and see.

 

Use FireFox, it is a much better browser.

 

Hey,

This probably won't help much, but for the record, IBM has a background utility that periodically runs and sucks the CPU power a lot. The utility is called python.exe, and what you're experiencing may be that it is running for those times that you have been trying to bring up a browser.
In order to see if this is the case, right click on the start menu, go to Task Manager, and see what processes are running. If you see python.exe running, don't shut it down or anything, but you will know that that's the cause of the slow-down. (It usually runs at 96-98% of the available processing power.)

I highly doubt that this is the problem, but it is possible, and it's probably a good thing to know anyway.

 

What exactly is the "Run the standard virus/malware tests and see."??

I have spysweeper/Microsoft Antivirus/Spywareblaster/Adaware/Spybot running on my laptop. What else is there?

 

Therein may lie your problem. That many different AntiSpyware programs can conflict with eachother. I use Microsoft AntiSpyware and Spybot together and they coexist well, but having four+ antispyware programs is crazy. Uninstall a couple and see what happens.

 

MS AntiSpyware is the only one I run, unless I'm cleaning a major infestation, in which case I'll use AdAware, MS AntiSpyware, and Spybot in that order, just to make sure everything's nuked. AdAware and Spybot don't run continuously, so MSAS doesn't have a problem with it. SpySweeper, that's Webroot's app, right? It DOES run continuously. Also, SpywareBlaster, while it DOES coexist with Spybot very well, isn't all that great, IMO.

 

My computer has run flawlessly with all 4 applications installed and running. This cannot be the issue. The issue is not spyware running continuously. Opening applications is slower than it should be. The spyware is not running 24x7. The spyware runs only when it's scheduled.

 

Is there anything that's all of a sudden taking up a lot of your CPU resources in the task manager? Could be worth checking.

Another thing to look at is the condition of your hard drive - check the S.M.A.R.T. status of your drive, see if it's failing anything. Could be on its way out.

Of course, these are pretty obvious things to look for, so just ignore me if you've checked them out already.