Hello All, I have a Dell Pentium PII 450 that I bought a little over a year and a half ago. I'm not sure what kind of motherboard it is..but the basics are...128mb ram, 16 gb maxtor hd, Turtle Beach II sound card and a STB nVidia TNT video card.

Now for the situation:

Ever since a few months ago, my computer is REALLY SLOW...it takes sometimes up to 5 minutes to boot up. The thing is, I've only used up about 4 GB of hd space and most of it are MP3s....at first, I thought it might be because I dl too many songs at once..so I tried DEFRAG....and for some odd reason, the only way I can defrag the hd was in SAFE MODE...and it took about a good 12 hrs. The problems keep on recurring and its bugging the crap out of me. I also removed most of my start up items and to no good effect. ARGH!!! To better describe the problem...whenever I try opening some programs it lags really bad and sometimes even freezes. I've even tried reformatting my hd..and still..after a week of use..its no use... Could it be a hd problem? I feel like the hd is not scanning fast enough? But if that was the problem..my comp would crash...right? ARgh..its just frustrating ??? Does anyone have any suggestions on where to go about solving the problem? I've called DEll..and they basically said, unless there's something mechanically wrong, i can't send the comp back to them. I'm running out of options...please HEEEELP!!!!!!!! I've tried everything!


Mike