Why does my computer keep grinding to a halt?

[Squarer]

Wherefore art thou, oh clever mumsnetters?

This blimming thing that calls itself a computer keeps just getting slower, and slower, and slower, until it just plain refuses to do anything, anything at all. To the point where I have to switch it off by holding the main power switch in for 10 seconds.

This is a recent thing. I have scanned for viruses etc but AVG tells me there are none. I suppose one way would be to ban DP as it always seems to go askew after he has been on it....

Does anyone know how or where to start looking for the problem? It's Windows XP btw.

Ours goes askew after the DSs have been on it. They claim only to be listening to music which was already downloaded but I don't know...they also like to play silly games on fhm.com and DS2 loves manipulating images; I always end up having to reboot too.

Also XP btw.

So I am not alone! DP can't seem to leave anything alone - he has to be fiddling about with something or other (fnar!). Drives me mad, and I usually just leave him to it, but then end up with the pieces (like now!). Mind you, it has happened this lunchtime, and DP is at work. All I had open was 3 web pages - emails, ebay and mumsnet.

Is he my most likely cause then do you think?

I've heard that messenger can screw your computer up a bit too. Any truth in that rumour does anyone know??

Oh yes, the boys msn a lot and there are loads of pictures and winkie things and nudges flashing back and forth so it could be that too.

I keep trying to train them to reboot when they've finished instead of just logging off but end up having to do it myself and it always takes ages

Cheers Janh!
I will spend the afternoon setting my account up as the administrator and blocking all his access to everything other than Word then

I have this problem too and the cause is downloaded crap whch dss SWEARS wasnt him Honest guv.

What I do is run ad-aware and spybot, delete everything that dss has installed esp junk stuff like pointers and pictures etc. In fact I regularly delete his whole profile and readd it cos thats quicker.

have a look in task manager and see what's hogging the cpu.

Lol at you deleting the whole profile Alligator - I have just run spybot and adaware this very morning - there was nothing major in either.

Warthog - I had a look in Task Mananger this morning - something was majorly hogging the CPU but when I ran a search on it it appeared to be an update .exe from Windows. There is LOADS of stuff on there though. Where does half of it come from? Is it running constantly if it shows up in there? [dim emoticon]

Have you tried defragmenting your hard drive recently? Can't hurt to give it a try if not.

Can'tsleep - DP did it last night apparently. In desperation!