I just recently fixed a problem on my computer, and now it seems that I have another.
I'm using a Dell Dimension 8300 thats about 5-6 years old, and I'm running Windows XP Home Edition, Service Pack 2. It has an Intell Pentium 4 CPU 3.00GHZ, and 512 MB of RAM. I use EZ Armor Firewall and eTrust Anti-Virus, along with AVG Free Version Anti-Virus. I also have Ad-Aware SE Personal version, also free, for catching spyware.
I just recently removed a troublesome driver from my system, and it no longer crashes frequently like it used to. However, it's now running incredibly slow and freezing up all the time, for no clear reason. I had a friend of mine come and look at it, and he updated the video card and changed all of the settings for performance over quality, and even that made no difference. It takes the system almost 5 minutes to start up, and it takes almost a minute for it to open a program.
When I open My Computer or Control Panel, it takes about 30 seconds for it to load the things inside it, while it gives me the flashlight graphic. That's never happened before. This computer has gone through periods of running slow before, but it's never run this slow or taken so long to run before. The hard drive is not full; It has 112 GB capacity and is only using 40% of that right now - 67.3 GBs are still free. I've defragmented and cleaned up unused programs and checked for viruses and spyware. I have no idea what to do to make it run faster. I think something's seriously wrong with it.
What should I do?