My Presario 1250 laptop is - for lack of a more technical word - lazy.
The response time to keyboard and mouse events is sometimes perfectly
good, and sometimes horrible. I put the cursor over "File" in some
arbitrary program, and the click button appears, but sometimes, there is
no response for up to several seconds. While I am typing text into a
word processor, the text stops appearing for a few seconds, then catches
up with what I typed.

What is characteristic of these 'lazy' events is that just before the
response finally happens, I hear a noise that I interpret as the hard
drive spinning up.

I haven't really any good notion as to how to go about analyzing the
problem, but I wonder if anyone has any notion of what might be
happening. I have Computer Associates EZ-Antivirus; Zone Alarm
Firewall; Spybot Search & Destroy; Ad-Aware.

Running Windows 98 4.10.1998 - the version of Windows that came with the
computer.

Thanks for any help

Eanruig