Hi,

After much trauma, a couple of replacement hard drives and motherboard replacement, my E521 seemed to be working fine. I added 2gb of ddr2 memory and a second SATA hard drive. I unloaded a bunch of useless software including Roxio and the antivirus pig that came with the machine. I did this clean up because I do a lot of video with this machine.

 

Anyway, within the past two weeks the machine starts off fine and then bogs down. This is particularly true with  Internet access. I'll go to the first couple of pages and then it takes minutes to load the next page. I've tweaked the machine for DSL and speed checked it regularly with the average 2795Kb/s download and 690Kb/s upload and a latency of about 64ms.

 

Last night when it came to a stop on the third page, I checked the process screen and saw that "system Idle" was at 99%. The hard drive was working, but nothing was happening.

 

Does anyone have a clue as to the potential problem and/or solution?

 

I have run anti virus, adware and root-kit checks...clean.  I have deleted all temporary internet files and cookies, turned off the anti-phishing portion of IE7, but nothing seems to work.

 

By the way, I'm using internet access as a prime example, but other programs also tend to slow down after a bit of use.

 

Machine name: DELL
   Operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2 (2600.xpsp_sp2_qfe.070227-2300)
           Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer: Dell Inc
       System Model: Dimension E521
               BIOS: )Phoenix - Award WorkstationBIOS v6.00PG
          Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+,  MMX,  3DNow (2 CPUs), ~2.0GHz
             Memory: 3070MB RAM
          Page File: 284MB used, 8625MB available
        Windows Dir: C:\WINDOWS
    DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
DX Setup Parameters: Not found
     DxDiag Version: 5.03.2600.2180 32bit Unicode

 

Dick