PC randomly goes ultra-slow

[McGraw]

See my sig. XP SP2

Examples:

Leave my machine defragging overnight. Come to it in the morning to find it still on 80%. Think "Oh well, it's a perfectdisk aggressive placement defrag, perhaps it's supposed to take that long". Come back from work to find it on only a few % more. Try to use the machine and it's completely unresponsive.

Playing FS2004 and the frame rates just drop to appalling levels and it takes about 5 minutes to come out of the game.

Using photoshop and it takes longer to open pics than it does on my work pc which is a 600mhz with 256mb of ram.

When any of these things happen, it takes 5 or so minutes to get Windows to shut down.

I have a firewall, anti-virus, spybot and my defrag program only runs when I tell it to.

It hasn't happened for a while and I was wondering whether this might be causing it:

When playing multi monitor FS2004, moving a 3d window to the other screen sometimes caused it. Now I've updated from cat 5.4 to cat 5.5 it (touch wood) hasn't happened since.

Could the Catalyst multi-monitor software have been causing it?

I have another problem due to multi-monitor that I am going to outline in another thread.

Thanks for any advice.

[Paul K]

What processes are running from start up? Do you leave your AV running during defrag and do you have anything like indexing turned on? Have you looked at task manager to see what has the CPU locked up or what might be hammering your resources and have you looked at your temps or checked for hard drive problems recently?

[TheBlueRaja]

Like paul says - press CTRL-ALT-DEL, click on where it says CPU twice and look at what process is at the top next time it happens.

[McGraw]

Cheers, will have a look.