Dell computer runs slow

Well if you are on the internet your computer could be full of virus's and spyware and Malware. That will mess up any windows computer. Update any anti virus, spyware and Malware products you have and see what happens. How old is this computer?

When they run slooooooow then the very first thing I would suspect is either spyware or a virus. Usually spyware. They are sort of dumb virus's that will just keep loading more and more until the computer is so overloaded it slows to a crawl.

If you can go to trend micro and use the free house call web scan. This will check for both virus's and spyware and fix them. If you see an improvement then you are the right track and need to check using other programs. Two excellent ones are AdAware and Spybot S&D (both FREE) For a excellent antivirus I recommend Avast Home.
www.adaware.com
www.lavasoftusa.com
www.avast.com

If that seems overwhelming right now your other option is to save off all of your documents files, book marks, favorites and so on and then reinstall windows. Sometimes that is the only thing that fixes everything is a fresh start.

The other thing to check is if you have an antivirus running is to make sure it is the only one running. If you have two running at the same time then this will cause the problem. The other thing is that some antivirus programs such as avg or fprot will do this if they are erroring out. That will cause 100% cpu usage which shows up as everything being slow.

If you do ctrl-alt-del to bring up the task manager then look at the processes tab and see what is using all the cpu. System idle should be the highest number. If you see that the problem is your antivirus simply uninstall and your should be back to speed.

just try to scan for viruses first and after doing that and if it is still the same unfortunately what you are going to have to do is to reformat the computer so that the NB's information is fresh. 100% that yould resolve your issue.