Progam freeze-ups, sluggishness and "End task" function not working.

Start Task Manager by right clicking on any tool bar and choosing Task Manager.

Have a look at the "Processes" tab, and look at the "CPU" column - this tells you which application are using which percentage of power.

If if the computer is just sitting waiting, then System Idle should be taking the most percentage of power.

If there is any process which seems to be taking up more than its fair share of power, you may have your culprit and thus you should remove that program (as long as it is not essential for the running of the computer) and then check how the computer behaves with it out of the way.

If it behaves well, you may wish to re-install the program afresh, as sometimes installs simply go wrong, and see what happens then.

Remember though, this only tells you the *percentage of power* being used by the CPU so that if the computer is idling, it is only using, say 1% of its power, System idle will take up 98% but that equals 98% of 1%.

So, with Task Manager open, you need to open Word and look at the figures in Task Manager and repeat this with Real Player.

I would also recommend you download and run "Hijack This" and Ad-Aware (both free). (do a Google search for these programs) and post in the Virus/Spyware forum for someone to check the Hijack log (unless of course you are skilled in interpretation of results yourself.)

A further thought is that the memory might be faulty, there is a program called "Memtest" (also free) that will test the memory - you need a floppy for this, if my own memory serves - but I think you can run it just as well from a USB memory stick.

Message Edited by Delierious on 10-25-2006 04:10 AM

Yes! I’ve had another thought…

As far as Word causing 50% CPU figures, I have 8 major programs open including Word IE and Excel and the maximum spike was 7%, as I typed in Word. This is on an AMD 2.4Ghz + 756Mb RAM

Go to Explorer and find your Temp folder (I have several and only one ever gets anything thrown into it, so look for them all)

Order the files by date and delete anything over 2 days old. This applies just to the files in Temp, not in subdirectories. I am told that you can delete them too but I have always been too cautious.

Empty the recycle bin.

Now do a search for *.log, delete all but the 2 latest ones in each folder. I know Zone Alarm for example keeps more logs than you can wave a stick at, and you only need the last 2 at the most.

Now do a search on all drives for
*.tmp; *.gid; ~*.*; *.bak; *.old (cut and paste this into the search box)

In the search results, order the files by date and delete anything over 2 days old

Now go to IE and delete all cookies and off-line files

Now re-empty the recycle bin.

Re-boot.

Any improvement?

It is not a case of unloading unneeded files, although you might see why that is a desireable thing; it is a case of a known problem with XP that does not rid itself of *.tmp and other unwanted files and these file cause trouble when Windows and other programs start to load.

Although it appears on the face of it that Real Player is the problem, and Dell have been more than generous, failing to clear out the files mentioned is certainly a cause of slow running and erratic behaviour.

More to the point, it doesn't take long and it costs nothing to do.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/280821

Does this solve anything?

OK, before I run out of ideas:

1. Did you delete all temporary files as I mentioned earlier? You must do. These do cause a real problem and it has nothing to do with space on the hard disk.
2. Do a search for the file, normal.dot
2a. delete all instances of it.
3. re-boot, and Word will create a new clean normal.dot