Why is my computer suddenly running so slowly when I have no viruses and no spyware and clean drives

Yesterday I was watching a DVD on my laptop with my girlfriend when suddenly the computer started to lag-- the sound and video on the DVD started to break up as if my computer though it was a bad movie. After the lag, I ran Ad-Aware, noticing that it took forever for the program to come up, only to find that no spyware was on my computer besides basic tracking cookies. I restarted my computer, thinking that maybe something so simple would fix it, but no, it took 5 minutes for the computer to restart.

I have defragmented my drives, used Disk Cleanup, checked for viruses with Norton Anti-Virus, removed any spyware that existed, and still my computer is extremely sluggish.

I am using Windows XP on a HP laptop with 1 Gig of ram. Not sure what else you need to know, but my computer was much, much faster before this sudden change.

Thanks in advance for any answers.

Why is my computer suddenly running so slowly when I have no viruses and no spyware and clean drives?pc security

The solutions to this problem can fall on many points. The easiest way to fix this slow down is to preform a system restore and restore to a previous point before the computer acted strangely. There is a high chance that some strange anomaly turn a 0 to a 1 in the registry and could potentially cause this problem, system restore would repair that.

If that is not an option, try to restart your computer in diagnostic mode. Go to start, run, and type msconfig. There, there should be several buttons reading normal, selective, and diagnostic. Diagnostic should be selected, when you close out, you should be prompted to restart. Restarting in this matter will start your computer without any other programs running except the needed files to run.