What Is This? Lagging Badly...
 

I've had my laptop for about a year and a half now, and its never given me a weird problem like this (it started three days ago):

About ten minutes after I turn it on, all of a sudden, it doesn't matter what I'm doing, the little processor (?) fan turns on like the computer is working really hard on something. I close every window and program that I can see running, but the fan doesn't turn off (even after hours) and EVERYTHING runs really laggy and slow: internet, games, opening My Computer or the start menu, etc. I usually get frustrated and turn off the computer.

Anybody have any help? I don't know how to see what programs the CPU is working on, anything you can say to help me out would be greatly appreciated :)

Specs (that I know of): Pentium 4, 2 GHZ processor, 20 gig hard drive, Nvidia Geforce 4, 256 MB of RAM.

Well, if you want to see what the hell is going on, check into ye olde Task Manager, then search Google for the processes you have running. If one is a spywarez or some sort of malware, a nice little program called Ad-Aware will help you out, as well as Spywareblaster, and can't forget Spybot Search & Destroy. I would run all three of these programs after finding out what you've got going on in the background. If that fails, then I say, find someone with some space for your shit that you can't live without and format the beast. If you've been running that laptop for over a year and haven't formatted it, then it's damn well due for such.