Lagging windows and mouse pointer in Windows 7

Question

I'm using Windows 7 and on top of it I have installed Visual Studio 2010 and SQL server.

For some time now I have been experiencing a laggy behavior. Explorer windows minimize and maximize with a lag; the mouse pointer also moves slowly.

The question is: How can I detect if it's a malware or some corrupt registry setting that is causing the lag? It's a 3 GHz processor with 4GB RAM and a 500GB HDD.

here is a screen shot of my windows experience index

_{It almost feels like somebody has accessed my PC for monitoring. I'm on an office Domain, so this could be expected from the boss – though it's not officially told and I highly doubt that it is the case because I've been working here for 1 year now.}

Answer 1

Initially I though that this could be down to overheating or a virus/rootkit and made the following suggestions:

• Use a bootable antivirus product like Kaspersky Rescue Disk to eliminate malware as a possible cause.
• Use a temperature-monitoring program like HWMonitor to check for overheating.

Neither of these turned up any results so I suggested refreshing the Windows Experience Index to see if something was under-performing. John updated his post with his score and it showed that there seemed to be a problem with the graphics hardware/drivers. I looked around on the Internet and it turns out that there is a utility on Intel's web site for automatically updating drivers. Hopefully this has solved the problem.

Answer 2

Some of the nice graphic effects of windows 7 requires a decent card. With an integrated card, you should disable the windows 7 Aero effects. That would slow down window repaints and mouse move. From the taskbar, right click "properties", then unclik "preview aero peek. Also change the Areo theme in personalization to basic, and any other options to display translucent borders, mice effects, etc. Maybe you can borrow a graphics card to notice the difference in performance. They are relatively inexpensive, starting around $20.