Okay. So lately (the past few weeks) my computer every once in awhile starts running slow. It will run perfectly fine and then just randomly it slows down. To clear things up no I don't have a virus I ran AVG and got nothing. Yes my computer can handle a lot. It's 6GB ram. The most I  run anyways is Chrome, Firefox, my documents, and bittorrent. I don't run 20 windows at a time or anything like that. I'm not downloading 50 games and 50 movies at once either or anything that would clearly slow down my computer. I actually used to download a lot more files at once and nothing went wrong.

I have no idea what is wrong. I used to be pretty good with computers but I have no idea what this is. I get no notifications from my computer of anything going wrong. Today my computer has run like crap. As I type this it's fine but it's slowed down and froze quite a few times. Doesn't matter what I'm doing. Even my task manager failed to start a few times. I didn't clear out my history in Chrome for awhile so I thought maybe that slowed it down a little, nope. I cleared that. 

Any suggestions?

When it is slow, can you post a screenshot the Processes tab of Task Manager after pressing "Show processes from all users" with it sorted by the "CPU" column?

General advice though:

- Go to msconfig and disable all non-Microsoft services and as many startup programs as you can
- Run more than one kind of antivirus scan if you have a problem. For example MSE.

My laptop rarely ever makes any sound. Occasionly it gets warm if I'm doing a few things but for a second. My laptop is running fine right now. I don't get it. It started today when I was just watching a movie. Like half way through it stopped and it got all laggy. Like 10 mins later I got it to start again, watched it and it happened again like 20 mins. I don't really clean dust out of my computer but I dont even think I have any. I keep it somewhere it wont get dust anyways. 

Edit: @ Soleron. I can hardly do anything when my laptop gets slow. Sometimes I can but usually it makes things worse. 

its a laptop? does it have the same issues if you have it plugged in or on battery power? Other than that I have similar problems with my desktop when it got clogged with too much dust so i had heat problems on high loads.

Have you tried kicking it?

Along with virus checks, you should check for spy and malware. I use the free version of spybot search and destroy. Works great and when I get family/friend PCs with this same issue its always fixed by checking for viruses and spyware. Sometimes its best to run these when logged in under "safe mode".

I punched the keyboard and screen. Didn't seem to fix it. 

Does this happen after you come out of sleep/hibernate? My HP hates going to sleep, so when I wake it up... depending on how long it's been asleep, it runs like total shit and I have to restart it. Try disabling sleep and hibernate if you think that's what it is. Depending on the computer, it may not like it. Mine is fine if it falls asleep for a little bit, but gets worse the longer I leave it.

Running Malwarebytes and checking for spyware is also a really great suggestion. You really need spyware protection anyway. I use Spyware blaster, but it only works with Firefox/Ie. It doesn't support Chrome yet... they're working on it. It keeps my computer squeaky clean... it's passive protection that runs innoculation, isn't a background process... which I like. You still need a scanner like Malware bytes though to check every once in a while. I don't think it comes with innoculation...

You really need to take a look at Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del) the next time you get slowness. It's the only way to be able to find the problem process if there is one... otherwise, we can't really help. If you see nothing using CPU massively (slowdown probably means something is running at 100%), then you might have a system problem. That could be spyware. If you see nothing, then that could also be the system process, like the bad sleep issue I get, acting like there is a massive memory leak somewhere, but no underlying software problem. It could also be a software issue... just a bad programming error with something you are run that only occasionally causes issues. I've had 100% CPU usage happen with Google Talk... a low impact program ironically.

Try to run in safe mode for some time and see if issue is still there..also do make regular screenshots of your task manager screen and post them here later..i highly think it might be due to virus..i had once issue like this..there was a process FUN.exe that will make the computer damn slow after some time..i don't remember it much now.

if running software fixes don't work, run chkdsk with both boxes checked (or do /r switch in command prompt with admin privilage) and see if there are file system errors you can fix and get a HDD check utility to see if your HDD is fucked up. Dying drives can slow down your system to a crawl and if that's the case, you are not at the coffin yet and should back up your shit asap.