My laptop was working fine for all these months until about 12 hours ago, when all of a sudden it slowed to a crawl. On a fresh boot, all applications seem to behave normally until I launch Outlook 2003, which is slow and also slows down the other applications, even after I close Outlook (and I make sure that the Outlook.exe process has disappeared from the Processes tab of the Task Manager). When I say "slow," I mean that it can take several minutes to respond to a keyboard event or to a click & drag with the mouse. (The mouse pointer, though, is not slow.) In Outlook, for example, closing a received message can take several minutes instead of being instantaneous like it usually is. Similarly, sending a message to the outbox takes about 5 minutes vs. being instantaneous. Pulling up the CNN.com home page in my IE6 browser took 10 minutes.
Besides the slowness, another symptom is the "hard drive" light is on continuously (not flashing), but I can hear that the hard drive is not actually spinning.
The first thing I did was to check the Task Manager to see which process was causing this, but to my surprise, the CPU % was less than 10% (and still is, many reboots later). I tried Safe Mode but still have the same problem. This problem seems like a needle in a haystack. Are there any diagnostics that I should run? My .pst file is nearly 1.9 GB, so that probably isn't helping. I also haven't tried a Detect & Repair yet because that will probably take hours with the current slowness. (I recently defragmented the hard drive and gave about 3 GB of free space.)
The laptop is a 3-year-old Compaq Presario V5303nr. 55 GB drive, 2 GB RAM, 1.6 GHz Athlon processor. It's running Windows XP SP2.
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