A friend's Windows XP laptop has become extremely unresponsive over the last few days, taking over 30 seconds to open My Computer for example and a over a minute to open a locally stored Word document. I assumed that a process was consuming all the CPU but on looking in Task Manager, the CPU hovers around 10% while loading MS Word or performing other tasks.
Any ideas???
It's a fairly old computer – 2GHz P4 with 256Mb RAM but has been reasonably usable up to now.
Best Answer
That could be caused by disk activity. Eventually the disk is getting bad, and the OS needs several retries to retrieve data from the disk.
Install a software that does SMART reporting (search for the SMART tag on superuser for several tools) and check if the disk reports anything bad.
Maybe 256 Mb RAM is not enough and the system is swapping a lot. Check with Process Explorer the I/O activity.