Anyone know what could be wrong with my computer ?
Heres some screenshots of the Task Manager if it helps:
http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c216/f...
http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c216/f...
First of all, you don't need 2 antivirus programs on your computer - that's overkill. They take up quite a lot of system resources and having 2 of them run at the same time is overtaxing your system. Uninstall one of them - I suggest keeping McAfee. Just by doing that, your system should run a lot smoother.
The rest should then run fine - AIM, Itunes, and Firefox. Note, I had Itunes and it always ran very slow for me. I didn't like it. So, I uninstalled it and downloaded (from download.com for free) a music managing program called MediaMonkey. It runs a lot smoother than Itunes and you can do all the things you can with Itunes plus more. If you install MediaMonkey, you can uninstall Itunes (you can always re-install Itunes if you change your mind).
I hope you have a firewall program? A good firewall program monitors the traffic of your network connection and keeps out the "bad" traffic. I suggest ZoneAlarm. However, if you have Windows XP with SP2, then that has a firewall built in and should work fine. You should also have an Adware program that detects small programs that can track your activity (I suggest Lavasoft Ad-aware). Also, you need a Spyware program to protect your system from Trojans (an added level of protection on top of your anti-virus program). I suggest Spybot. You can download all these programs from the Internet - just Google them.
I hope this helps.
First of all, I'm 100% sure, your problem has something to do with having 2 antivirus. Having 2 antivirus makes the 2 fight each other to scan the files first, thus eating hardware(speed) resources.
2nd. As I can see in your task manager, you have still plenty of free ram, so the ram your programs consume IS NOT A PROBLEM!
What I see is the real lagging problem is that some program it's using 100% or almost that much CPU. Find that program, and you have found your problem.
If the program is one of the 2 antivirus, uninstall one of the 2 and problem solved. If it's another program, uninstall it, and if you want install a substitute.
Of the 3 mentioned program, what seems to me be the most bloatware one (and with bloatware I don't mean only ram, but also registry entries, spyware(Apple tries to make you download more Apple programs), is itunes. If you have this program because it came with quicktime player, you should substitute them(quicktime player + itunes), with "quicktime alternative" or "QT lite", these are lighter, cleaner, more functional, less abusive, and gives you more freedom. Googgle them.
Good Luck.
ps. ram is hundred of times faster than disk, what do you prefer, having web pages on ram thus surfing faster, or have them load on disk caching system, and slower browsing. You have ram to spare, use it!
If firefox uses 100mb or more of ram, it's because you have loaded lot of heavy pages, like youtube (each video = 20mb, thus 5 videos 100mb), pages with lot of graphics, etc. plus the pages you browsed recently. If you push back button the previous page come faster because it's cached on ram.
Alternatively if you want a faster browser, the faster one is opera, the second firefox, third safari (not recomended, not secure enough i readed), fourth microsoft internet explorer.
The most secure is firefox (always updated), opera (good coded), internet explorer (7 version and higher only), and last, safari(I readed it doesn't have phishing protection yet).
Bye!
NOTICING YOUR CPU IS MAXED OUT AT 100%,I AGREE WITH THE OTHER ANSWERER ABOUT LOOSING ONE OF THE ANTI-VIRUS PROGRAMS.I PERSONALLY USE MCAFEE VIRUSCAN AND ITS RESOURCE CONSUMPTION IS REALLY LOW.I WOULD STICK WITH MCAFEE.THE ONLY OTHER THING I WOULD SUGGEST AND THERE WILL BE ALOT OF SNIFFLERS OUT THERE WHEN I SAY THIS IS TO DROP FIREFOX AND JUST USE INTERNET EXPLORER.IF YOU HAVE ALL THE PATCHES AND UPDATES FOR IE,I THINK IT IS STILL THE BEST BROWSER AND DOESNT NEED ALL THOSE ANNOYING PLUG-INS AT EVERY TURN WHEN YOU WANT TO DO SOMETHING NEW.FIREFOX LAGS EVEN THOUGH IT SEEMS LIKE A FASTER BROWSER AND IT MIGHT BE,IT USES WAY MORE RESOURCES THAN IE.THOSE PLUG-INS ADD UP AND SLOWLY HANDCUFF THE BROWSER ITSELF.THATS MY OPINION.I USE IE6 AND IE7 AND HAVE HAD NO PROBLEMS AND NO SECURITY LEAKS YET.TRY THE SWITCH YOURSELF AND SEE IF THERE IS A DIFFERENCE.I BET THERE WILL BE A SIGNIFICANT PERFORMANCE INCREASE WITH ONLY MCAFEE AND IE RUNNING.GOOD LUCK.
This is what to do, uninstall firefox, perform disk clean up
install firefox www.firefox.com
this should move normally.
Firefox had so many plugins on your machine that is why you see so many processes running.
It has the protection bug plugin (virus scanner), plugins for bookmark e.t.c
reinstalling might fix your problem.
Firefox might not also be so compatible with your machine thereby causing a single window of firefox to run in several processes, it is the same thing when you sum up the total of firefox processes, the only difference is that,it runs more in processes and there are errors in firefox scripts and bugs need to be fixed .reinstall it (firefox).
If this fails, perform disk clean up of machine, clear history, cookies, cache files.
update your antivirus and scan throughly.
It might also be from your machine brand.Update your windows too.
Firefox has a horrible prevention of viruses. That's all I can say.
For info on hacking, computer related problems refer :
http://rajeshhackingarticles.blogspot.co...
It really helped me...