I have a laptop and a desktop PC (vista and XP respectively). In the past 1 – 2 months, they both seem to run significantly slower. In particular, surfing the internet is very slow; loading pages can take minutes or not load at all. Reloading a page sometimes helps. This occurs regardless of the browser used ( I have used IE, firefox and chrome, all with the same result).

I have done the following and nothing has helped:
– run a registry cleaner
– run AVG and Adaware anti-virus and anti-malware programs
– cleaned the hard drives and defrag’d them
– ensured I have more than 500 mb space on the "C" drives (I have plenty of space)
– removed non-essential programs from auto start up
– verified the speed of my internet connection

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks.