My computer was succumbing to viruses. Instead of waiting for the inevitable, I backed up my important files and decided to start over. Instead of taking my tower into the store and having them wipe the hard drive clean and start fresh, I got the disk and did it myself (poor college student), one of those where you put it in and restart the computer, and it does most of the work.

I got Windows XP back on my computer and started fresh, but I have some problems.

The computer seems very slow. It opens programs slowly, and you can practically see the screen flashing slowly as it opens new e-mail in Outlook Express or as I scroll down a web page.

The only things I've installed since I got on are Firefox, Norton 360, and the driver for my printer. Did I screw this up, or did I just not install everything I need to?

If anyone here can help me through this, it would be very much appreciated.

From the sounds of it... the install disc you used didn't install the drivers for your video card and maybe other hardware. Check your Device Manager to see if there are any yellow question marks.

This is a very important step to speed up computer. Windows registry is just like a database which stores all the computer information. Every time you install a program, save a files or install a new driver on your computer, the registry keeps a record which called entry, these entries will be left in the registry even the related programs/files/drivers/ were removed thus make them obsolete even corrupted. That is the biggest reason for a slow running computer, if you keep ignoring these wasted entries, error messages might pop up from time to time and even crash your computer eventually.