what causes slow computers????

[coops]

I have a machine I am working on for a friend. It is about 4 months old, celeron 766 (or whatever in that range) and installing programs takes forever. When the papers fly from folder to folder they stop in the middle for a few seconds. Could this be a HD issue? It is a Fujitsu 10gig and lately they have been problematic for me. Fans are all working, inside the box it is cool, cdrom is 52x so that isn't slow. Just wondering if there are other areas to look at. thanks
brent

[Ghaud]

Multitude of possibilities, including:

• Not much memory (it's cheap now, good time to buy).
• Hard drive not defragmented (at least once a month).
• A bunch of stuff you don't really need loaded into memory (do the 3-finger salute to see what's running -- Ctrl>Alt>Delete).

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Thimk!

[Cliffh]

Along with what Ghaud said:

Check the System Properties - right click on My Computer, choose Properties, Performance - to see if any of the drives are listed as running in MS-DOS Compatibility mode.

Might want to run Scandisk, Disk Defragmentor and a full system (all files, not just program files) virus scan with an up-to-date AV program.