slow computer

[TEAK36]

I am baffled as to why my Laptop is going slow.Whenever I open up any internet page it takes about 20 seconds to load.The Laptop is only 5 months old, with 1GB Ram. I store all my downloaded files on and external hard drive,so its not a problem with HD space.I do weekly maintenance and get rid of my temp files,do a disc clean up and defrag.I dont have loads of uneccessary programs running on startup either.I have a 10MB cable broadband connection, and I get really good download speeds, so I dont think it is a Broadband problem.
I have Norton 2006 installed and I know this can be a resource hog, but surely it would not cause this much of a slow down.My Broadband connection is connected wirelessly to a 54MB router, but as I get really good download speeds, I dont think this would cause the problem.

Any help would be most appreciated.

[RATTER15]

Im no expert but sounds like a virus problem to me, try installing AVG virus scanner its free and better than norton.

[NubMaster]

Norton is your problem, uninstall it and see how much faster your machine is ! I have done this on loads of machines now, F-Secure is much better, cheaper and updates every day, where Norton only updates once a week, this could mean 20% of the worlds computer get a virus only doing one update a week.

[fo3nix]

I'm not entirely sure it's just Norton. It shouldn't slow it _that_ much. Is the computer just generally slow, or only when opening websites?

Run this speed test from your laptop and report back the speed you get:
http://www.ookla.com/speedtest/

[TEAK36]

fo3nix,

I ran the speed test and it shows a download speed on 961Kbps.This seems a pretty decent speed to me.

[fo3nix]

961kbps download speed? That isn't 10Mb.

I'm on a 2Mb line here, and doing other things with the connection while I ran the test, and I got a download speed of over 2000kbps, which is what I should get.

Your download speed should really have a 0 on the end of it, if it's 10Mb.

[TEAK36]

Hi fo3nix,
Thanks for the info.My laptop is connected wirelessly at the moment, but I will run the speed test whilst 'wired' to see if this makes any difference to the speed.If not I will be on the phone to NTL to ask them to sort it out.

[fo3nix]

Make sure you run it while no-one else is connected or downloading anything either. Another wireless user can slow it down, especially if they're downloading something quite large.