im at my inlaws for the weekend, and im trying to use their pc. this is the slowest pc i've ever seen and im baffled at what it could be.
ive run the disk cleanup and defragged cleaned out cookies and tempfiles and it's still crazy slow. click on an icon from the main screen and it takes about 10 minutes to open the file. it's running xp any help would be appreciated.
Without seeing it or knowing the details, I would say it spyware and/or viruses. Run Malwarebytes, that should get most of it. Spybot Search & Destroy is also good. SuperAntispyware seems to be new and pretty good.
Look and see what programs are running at the bottom right. My mom had one of those realtime weather programs, and it was an unbelievable resource hog. You could also pull up the Task manager and see which processes are sucking the most memory. If the name is just a crazy jumble of letters, you can do a search on the net to see if it's a valid process.
You might want to check the anti-spyware software that may be running in the background. My pctools stuff is good but it takes forever to run its scans when starting up. Some of the protective software is more annoying than the occasional virus.
For spyware, it can be a real struggle, and at the end you will never really know if you got it all or not. I prefer to start with a clean OS install to a formatted disk and build it back to what I want...