Slow laptop - Inspiron 5100

[gfender]

I've been trying to diagnose a slow Inspiron 5100 for almost 3 weeks now with no luck. The bootup has been very slow all of a sudden and the mouse skips across the screen. It seems to be getting worse and worse as time goes on which makes me think it might be a hardware issue. A flash movie or game crawls by to where it's not even worth dealing with. Also, while i wasn't there, the laptop blue screened on bootup and stated there was a hardware problem. Unfortunately my friend did not remember what the rest of the message said. However, a system restore prevented the blue screen from appearing again however it did not improve the performance. Here are the specs for the computer:
Dell Inspiron 5100 Notebook
512mb RAM
60GB Hard Drive
Windows XP Home SP2
2.4ghz CPU

These are the things I have tried:
1. Search all running processes on google to see if any of them are spyware. None were but I ran spy bot and adaware just in case.
2. Removed unnecessary startup programs, only a few, which did not increase performance.
3. Called Dell many times but their support is awful.
4. Formatted the hard drive and installed a fresh copy of windows hopoing it was just a junky OS. This seemed to help for a week or so but then it just started to get slow again.

Thank you in advance for any help with this problem. I have been stuck on this for many hours with no solution. Anything will help!

 

[stduc]

4. Formatted the hard drive and installed a fresh copy of windows hopoing it was just a junky OS. This seemed to help for a week or so but then it just started to get slow again.

How much did this help and how did the install go, quickly or slowly?

I'm wondering if you have one of those virus's/worms/trojans that can survive a re-format?

How about posting your tasklist and a hijack this log and see if anyone can help?

 

[macten88]

Make sure that the indexing service is not running.

 

[gfender]

Thanks for your replies. I posted HijackThis results to another forum before and they said there was nothing out of the ordinary. I thought it was very odd that a format didn't fix the problem, this usually works. It's possible that a virus resides in some other place than the hard drive and it just won't go away. Another thought I had was that it could be a hardware problem butit would be present in safe mode as well which is doesn't seem to be but i may be mistaken.

 

[gfender]

The problem turned out to be a faulty fan that was slowing the system down significantly. I finally figured this out after Dell replaced almost every part until the culprit was found.