I've got a 4 year old Dell laptop which has been fine for surfing the net etc. However about 2 weeks ago the mouse started stuttering as you moved it across the screen ie a delay.

I then updated versions of CCleaner and avast and now the machine is taking 30mins to boot up and the hardrive is continually working. I've run spybot and anti virus which have found nothing… any ideas?

Ta

Could be all manner of things, but I've seen this occur when the hard disk is failing DMA transfers, causing windows to switch it PIO mode.

Try downloading http://download.wdc.com/windlg/windlg_117.zip and seeing if there are any errors

retro thanks for that, it wouldn't surprise me, there is a fault with the power pack, which switches the machine off without warning quite often, so I wouldnt be surprised if there is disk error. I'll try it tonight, normal XP scandisk took for ever to run but didn't return any errors.

It's pretty cold at the mo, so the electricity could be freezing in the wires overnight.

It's probably down to the weather.

is something squashing the network cable, the dropped packets may have started to clog the cable and if they begin to clot then that could move up into your RAM and you may end up running windows 3.1, is the left hand side of the keyboard ok? have the pixels dropped on one side? do the PCMCIA eject buttons work? oh hang on, have you tried turning it off and on again?

there is a fault with the power pack, which switches the machine off without warning quite often

It might be kicking itself into power save mode all the time and back if the AC adapater is wrecked…

Try going to the power management settings and setting for performance. Depending on the Dell you may need to use Quickset, Dell Control Panel, DCP or the generic windows software.

What make / model is it?

Failing that the HDD is dying.