Windows XP very slow / a Lot of HardDisk Activity?

Hello there:)

Lately My PC became very Slow!

I've Re-setup Windows more than a time with no use.

Windows Was setup on a Clean NTFS Drive .

I have a Intel Pentium 2.4Ghz / Chache 512 /533 and 512 DDR2 RAM.

I have a 80GB 7200rpm IDE Maxtor HardDisk Drive.

a MSI 865PE NEO2 Mother Board.

and further a Nvidia FX5200 Graphics Card.

that's for the Hardware specifications.

for the software part:

Windows XP Professional SP2 with All Updates.

Visual Studio 6 , 2005 , SQLServer 2005

Norton Antivirus 2007

Microsoft Office 2003

No Viruses/ Spyware/ Malware.

is it the HardDisk that has turned Slow ?

please tell me what may be wrong. and thank you all in Advance!

Windows XP very slow / a Lot of HardDisk Activity?virus scan

I have the same problem with my lap top and I do have 1 GB RAM. I have over 30 GB memory available, no viruses/spyware/malware. I do get an error on occasions from "ccApp" which after looking it up on Google is a Norton application that a lot of people had logged problems with it.

Where can we find the System log?

Windows XP very slow / a Lot of HardDisk Activity?anti virus scan

in my experience, Norton Antivirus has always been bloaty (takes up a lot of resources and taxes computer performance because it sits in the background running, this especially effects how fast your computer is able to get from power off to the windows desktop ready to use)

More RAM might be a solution

Visual Studio is a pretty resource intensive program so adding more RAM (going from 512MB to 1GB could help speed things up)
In addition to the suggestions above, try checking your Event Log, especially the System log. Sometimes these symptoms happen when a hard drive is going bad. If that is the case you should see lots of I/O and disk errors in the log.
Could be running low on RAM and writing everything to the hard drive, I'd go for 1GB.