pc runs sooo slow now

[Perf]

for some reason which is beyond my computing knowledge my pc has started to run very slow.
when i open anything for example outlook express it appears that nothing is happening but give it some time and it eventually opens. the same with any other application such as daoc or vent or anything for that matter.
the pc is not new by any means but this a recent problem. i have zone alarm and avg running but i dont think these are causing it.
i ran a registry cleaner program which cleared loads of stuff.

any suggestions would be welcome

for the record. p4 2gb, 1.25 mb ram nvidia geoforce 6200 256mb

thanks

[Gahn]

Check if, by chance, the Ram occupation under Task Manager is awfully high and it writes much on the HD.
If that's the case could be that the Swap File became corrupted and needs to be cleared and recreated (after a Defrag).

[Cromcruaich]

Good place to start, re RAM. Could well be the problem - but then you have to identify why your memory which was once adequate has suddenly become inadequate.

Trotting out the usual stuff - but it could be youve got loads of resident programs running (non techie way of telling is looking at the amount of icons youve got in the application bar - techies get nervous if there is anything but the clock their ). Or it could be that you have a virus or some malware.

Also stuff like outlook and outlook express can start to take ages to run if youve been messing around with newsgroups - so keep those cleared down - but if everything is running slowly then thats probably not related.

Could be that you are running out of harddisk space on your system drive

Sometimes its because the hard disk is starting to fail, or that its heavily fragmented (which exacerbates performance problems when ram is at a premium)

Well there are some ideas anyhow - its quite a broad subject to give advice on.

Fdisk ?

[Perf]

thanks for the input, it was in fact a full system drive.