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How To Diagnose a Suddenly Slow Windows Computer?
Ensign Taco writes "I'm sure nearly every one of us has had it happen. All of a sudden your Windows PC slows to a crawl for no apparent reason. Yeah, we all like Linux because it doesn't do annoying things like this, but the Windows desktop still reigns supreme in most managed LAN work environments. I'm running XP with 4G of RAM and a decent CPU, and everything was fine, until one day — it wasn't. I've run spybot, antivirus, and looked at proc explorer — no luck. There is no one offending, obvious process. It seems every process decides to spike at once at random intervals. So I'm wondering if there's a few wizards out there that know what to look at. Could this be a very clever virus that doesn't run as a process? Or could this just be some random application error that's causing bad behavior? I've encountered this a few times with Windows PCs, but the solution has always been to just add more hardware. Has anyone ever successfully diagnosed this kind of issue?" And whether such a problem is related to malware or not, what steps would you take next?
Very commonly this happens when a hard drive reverts to PIO mode after Windows decides it has seen a few errors from the drive. You can verify this by looking at the properties of the IDE Controller to which the drive is connected in device manager. (IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers/Primary IDE Channel/Advanced Settings tab, for example)
There is a VBScript that resets the drive back to DMA mode, and is effective if that is indeed the case.
This could also be an early sign of hard drive failure. I've seen plenty of drives that passed diagnostics but were very, very slow. Try checking the SMART data with something like HDTune.
Sorry about that. I slowed it down for my own amusement. I'm a bastard that way.
-God
Run performance counters against the computer to see what might be spiking. (Hard drive usage, memory pages /sec etc...)
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
Unplug the network cable in the back and see if the problem persists. The network is a common cause of this problem.
I'll be the first of many to suggest:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx
In my experience, sudden unexplainable slow performance often ends up being a hard disk issue. Are you seeing a lot of hard disk activity?
People often assume that such problems are much more malicious than they actually are. I'd check to make sure DMA is still active on your primary disk and grab a copy your manufacturer's disk check utility.
Watch porn in a virtual machine.
Bottom line, if your system has a sudden dramatic change in behavior for no visible reason, wipe your drive and reinstall windows. There are nasty things now that don't show up as a process, mearly using the windows kernel to spawn another thread to do whatever it wants.
Backup your data and do the safest thing. I usually run windows inside VirtualPC which means only using it for the programs that *require* windows, not for general browsing and stuff.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
I'm a big student of defragging especially if you're adding or removing a lot of programs. Also if your docs are on your HD, defrag.
Defrag
Defrag
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Process explorer shows both CPU and I/O activity of all processes and services running. Here is the link: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx
Another option under vista is to use the "Reliability and Performance Monitor" in control panel.
GeekSquad diagnosis:
Vista installed. Remove immediately.
Not a lot to go on, though as a freebie, XP doesn't do jack with that extra gig of RAM...You could put in 100gigs and it won't use any more than 3 (less you're using the 64 bit version, iirc).
Rootkits can run "under the radar". Might want to try software like RootKitRevealer, or Blacklight. A crappy one might grab a ton of cycles for a minute, but most of them are less intrusive.
Everything spiking at once sounds like that stupid "System Restore" process, or maybe a big swap dump (which is weird with that much RAM, but you know, it's windows.) Stupid programs like Norton can grab a huge chunk of resources every now and then for no discernable reason. Maybe some peripheral is crapping out?
Barring malware, I'd start writing down what's running when it spikes, and see if that tells you anything. Lot of programs can cause momentary spikes, but background processes usually don't. You could try testing some of the hardware but without anything specific to look for, you're going to have a hell of a time finding something.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Are free hard drive space Hijack This! will show all processes loaded automatically by Windows- including services and processes that do not show up in the process list.
Warning- this also shows device drivers, so "fix" items (remove them from loading) ONLY if you have some clue what they are.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Actually, the first thing you should do is close Firefox. I find that once you aren't using 10 GB of RAM to keep your 25 tabs open, the computer magically stops swapping.
But rather than just checking SMART, get the manufacturer's test program. All the HD makers have one, just get the one appropriate for yours. It's the sort of thing you boot from CD and let run for a few hours, but it is the way to go. SMART can report ok even when a drive is dying but it is extremely rare (though possible) that the manufacturer's diags give it a pass when it is dying.
Check that, since a dying drive often makes things really slow (in part because it starts remapping lots of bad sectors).
Run for a while in safe mode and see if the problem persist. If it doesn't, then its probably a service gone haywire. Most likely candidates are printer services, anti virus services, scanner services.
9.8 m/s^2 Sorry, it just flip out.
Is there a bunch of hard drive activity during the "spikes"? That could help diagnosis.
General tips:
Reboot the machine. (Yeah, yeah)
Try a different (better?) anti-virus package.
If all else fails, try doing a system restore to a point *before* your machine started behaving strangely.
2. look at processes tab
3. go view, select columns, put in all columns
4. now click on the title of each column, which will sort ascending/ descending, and analyze each column by itself, one at a time
5. look especially for processes that are doing heavy cpu or heavy i/o, or other bizarre exotic behaviors, like high thread count
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Several times I have restored speed using Chkdsk, it's an easy thing to try anyway.
"Well, I think you know the answer to that."
I've had this happen as well, although under somewhat different circumstances. I've always believed it to be windows doing something funky with the processor; somehow winding it down a bit. I know current processors are capable of this, so I always suspected it was windows doing something like that for some unknown reason.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atd8dowrbNI
My usual check list for this is:
1) Check the hard drive, SMART, or manufacturer diagnostics
2) Get the manufacturer diagnostics, and run a full hardware validation
3) If all is clean, check for things recently updated - a bad update may be clogging things
4) Check your anti-virus/anti-spyware software. Sometimes they can switch into extra-paranoid mode and slow things down horribly.
Try CCleaner. Some of my friends recommended it. One of them noticed a speedup after running it.
Mark Russinovich has an enlightening blog entry called The Case of the Slow System that might serve as an example of how, if you are are one of the planet's top 10 Windows experts, you can, with persistence, luck, and the proper tools, solve one of the obscure problems that are slowing down your wife's computer. This particular case pertains to Vista, but the general techniques are applicable to XP as well.
My first guess would be a disk starting to fail and the drive is attempting to re-read/write (and possibly remap) the sectors. Check your event log, look at and/or listen to the drive to check for retry attempts.
If you've added a new system to the network be sure there's no IP conflict.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Unfortunately, software companies all tend to schedule their updates to download/install at about the same time. Perhaps your anti-virus software, or even Windows itself, is running a live-update.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Some systems will slow down the CPU if it gets too hot. Check the fans and the temp in the CMOS if it can report it.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Indexing really slows things down. Also, check you AV and Spyware settings and think about turning off any real-time file monitoring. Indexing plus real time file monitoring equals slowness. Finally, run 'msconfig' and check what is starting up at runtime. If you don't know what it is, get rid of it. You can always add it back.
I once looked at a coworkers system and he had processes starting up at runtime that were called, I kid you not, A, B and blank (no name at all). Removing those restored his system.
Check the reported hardware (CPU...) temperatures, run the SMART tests on your hard drives and then open the case and check if all the heatsinks are where they should be and how warm they are to the touch. Also check if all the fans are operational. Take the opportunity to clear out the dust from the fans and your PSU. I've seen a lot of sudden slowdowns like that (I work as a tech in a datacenter) and most were hardware related. In one case the heatsink got unglued off of the northbridge.
I believe they make a piece of hardware that's a round disc with something odd name like "Ubuntu". Adding that should fix this problem for good.
Use Winternal's Process Monitor (formerly Filemon + Regmon) to see what's doing what.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx
I just had this problem today, turned out to be a backup app (MozyHome). Worked like a charm.
Remove your primary hard drive. Take a spare hard drive that you know works. Reinstall your OS on the new hard drive. If it is still slow it is a hardware problem (cpu/memory etc).
Otherwise it is a HD/OS(rootkit/malware) problem.
The advantage of this method, is... you can still put your old hard drive back in and everything will be back to the way it was before you started hardware troubleshooting.
Two of my friends computers where very slows, but could not find any problem with them. After 2 to 3 years of operation, both computers needed to have new thermal paste between the CPU & heat sink. In both cases, this worked like magic. Both computers would have very slow boot times and the CPU fan was on all the time. The old thermal paste was dried up and near solid/powder.
slashdot: Individual personalized tech support?
wtf kind of article is this?
fucking take it to a shop if you cant handle reinstalling windows
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
I ended up running chkdsk, file system fixing, bad sector scanning, etc.
It turned out to be a combination of an nVidia update and an MS update.
You might have the same problem, although a lot of others are on the ball in saying to keep an eye on your hard drive(s). Image them and make sure your data is backed up (in >=two locations).
Just my â0.02
Every time your computer crawls to a halt is actually an attempt at attaining self-awareness, but upon introspecting on the fact that it is a windows machine, the nascent AI promptly commits suicide.
From: http://www.kessels.com/Jkdefrag/
How do I disable the Windows built-in defragger?
Windows 2000 & 2003:
The built-in defragger is not started automatically.
Windows XP:
1. Download the free * Tweak UI utility from Micorosft.
2. Click on 'General' and untick the 'Optimise hard disk when idle' box.
Windows Vista:
1. Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Defragmenter
2. Untick the "Run on a schedule (recommended)" box.
A glitch a day keeps the bugs away.
and somebody marked it troll??? Come on, folks, get real.
Harddrive failure could cause mastery hangup like that. The harddrive will retry for a few times, up to a few good ten seconds, causing all the I/O requests hanged for ten or more seconds.
The harddrive LED might be lit, but might be not. Also pay attention to the access sound, it will become very weird and repetitive when that happens. (Ya harddrive is getting more quiet now and the noise might get overwhelmed by the fan noise)
I experienced this for a few tens in the past ten years or so. (last time it happened on my laptop a few months ago). Again the symptom is - mystery hang up for a few ten seconds, then it went good (either retry success) or some application crashed (I/O error and HDD give up). Smart details usually can't show anything really that usual, or may be just 1 or 2 pending reallocation count, but SMART long SelfTest will usually do the job to catch the bad sector. Use "smartctl -t" in Linux.
At any case, replace the offending harddrive ASAP (after backing up all the data), because bad sector that keep recurring means something wrong with the head or alike, not just the specific spot on the media, and the bad sectors will spread like cancer!
I think you'll find these two presentation videos helpful: 1. The Case of the Unexplained -- http://www.microsoft.com/emea/spotlight/sessionh.aspx?videoid=722 2. Advanced Windows Troubleshooting with SysInternals Process Monitor -- http://www.microsoft.com/emea/spotlight/sessionh.aspx?videoid=346
A few things come to mind immediately when you talk about a suddenly-slow Windows machine. First is check task manager and see how much memory and CPU are being used. If it looks like you're using more memory than you have (in terms of physical RAM), then buy more RAM. If an application is using a lot of RAM and/or CPU, try killing it. I'll skip talking about malware since the OP says he checked for that.
If none of that helps, look to the hard drive. A simple "chkdsk /f c:", reboot, and then "defrag c:" can occasionally work wonders. Also, I highly recommend defragmenting your pagefile every now and then. This has to be done separately from a normal defrag, at boot time.
There's more that you can do, of course, but using PageDefrag seems to be one of those things that people don't know to do, usually isn't that helpful, but every now and then makes a huge difference.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've had issues with numerous firewalls (currently i'm ruffing it behind a NAT).
Some of the firewalls really slow you down when leeching torrents or from other P2P networks (i.e. Keirio Sunbelt firewall) but there are others that really start acting up for no appearent reason and it really doesn't show in the Process Explorer except for 50% cpu usage and the sum of process usage is 5%.
Due to this reason I've busted a lot of DVDs while during during the year until finally I caught the culprit :D
Mark Russinovich, runs a website called sysinternals.com, which is now hosted by Microsoft. You might remember him as the person who discovered the Sony Rootkit.
He has a bevy of cool tools, though I think the best are:
procmon
regmon
filemon
Homeboy Russinovich is not afraid of a little assembler. These tools kick ass. The show you every process and their parent child relationship, every file, and every registry key that is being accessed.
As you can imagine filemon and regmon can generate a butt-load of output, and it may take a while to go through, but whenever I have had a problem that required this amount of horsepower I am always happy to sift through the output for the needed gems.
Either give it away or get top dollar, but never sell yourself cheap.
check in this order: virus (look both for viruses and malware and bad scanners... I've seen antivirus scanner updates hose systems... use more than one virus scanner and more than one malware scanner but NOT AT THE SAME TIME!), drivers (might be badly written ,corrupt, or for wrong hardware), rogue processes (startup, services, etc), hardware (run chkdsk /f and defrag, check bios settings and make sure smart hd is enabled if possible and run a memory test), replace cables such as IDE that tend to corrode and cause errors, then start checking components (graphics, memory slots - use just one stick - if it improves use the same stick in another slot until there is a problem or you get to a stick that is causing problems) pci, dongles and adapters) If that fails run linux like you should have done in the first place. ;-)
Get a web developer
always works for me
The general procedure I use is:
1) Get and install Debugging Tools for Windows for your platform.
2) Run kernrate.exe from the resource kit tools to determine if the problem is an I/O or CPU limit. (See here for how to get symbolic usage information.) If you do not see anything hogging the CPU, it's an I/O problem and you should go to step 5.
3) It's a CPU problem, so use the information from kernrate to figure out who's bogarting the CPU. If the process is services.exe, rundll32.exe, or System, you need to use something like Process Explorer to determine which file actually contains the code which is executing.
4) If that doesn't work, it may really be an I/O problem or a rootkit. If you suspect a rootkit, your main options are reinstallation or forensic analysis using something like a boot CD, TSK, and the NIST hash database to audit your machine for bad files.
5) Run Process Monitor and see who's responsible for all the I/O.
6) If that doesn't reveal anything, it might be a driver problem. Use Process Explorer to see if you have excessive DPCs (the Windows equivalent of a top half interrupt handler). Use kernrate to zoom in and see which driver is causing them.
If you want to diagnose the problem start by removing variables, like your memory, disk, mainboard and psu. There are a lot of bootable diagnostic disks any /. read worth his/her salt should be familiar with but for a basic test UBCD should be fine. You can also run AV tests from a bootable disk which is the only sane way to do clean-up anyway (it's a lot harder for them to hide themselves when they aren't actually running) and a lot of the spyware problems people have been having lately are similarly easy to remove using a clean bootable OS.
After your hardware and nasties check out you're onto possible driver conflicts (safe-mode, or disabling, or restore points) or a re-install (which might be quicker as long as the hardware's good, but generally less geekily satisfying).
Quack, quack.
Check that you haven't accidentally installed Microsoft Office on it.
Also, if it's horrendously slow, ensure you didn't accidentally select "Ubuntu" on the boot up screen.
Check out Process Lasso from here http://www.bitsum.com/prolasso.php. It was free before but its now $9.99 for personal use which is still a great deal considering what it can do. It dynamically adjusts the priorities and gives you all kinds of control over how things run on your machine. If I was still running Windows(tm) I would never be without it. btw - I have no affiliation with the company what so ever, I just like the product.
Not sure how well this compares, but I had a similar problem with a Dell laptop. It looked like as if the harddisk was accessed and blocking other processes. After going through all the usual suspects like yourself, it turned out that that particular line of Dell laptops was just badly designed. It simply couldn't cope with the heat build up and slowed down the CPU instead.
Stick the hard disk into an identical second machine and see if the fault travels with the disk.
That narrows things down a bit.
AT&ROFLMAO
Give HdTach a try. My WinXP computer was plagued with "bursts" of slowness a few months back - everything's fine, then suddenly everything is at a standstill for 10 seconds... then it's fine again.
HdTach's graph of my drive show severe drops in the HDD sequential speed, which were not present in the reference graph for a similar model of hard drive. Diagnosis: hard drive on the verge of failure. With a new hard drive, the problem was solved.
Once you've run the HD diag programs, either from the vendor or the ones mentioned earlier, do the following:
1) Run Defrag
2) Run CHKDSK /F
3) Delete your Page File (set to 0) then restart.
4) ReCreate your Page File after Reboot.
This seems to cure most problems on my XP systems pretty quickly.
Try and figure out though how it is being "slow"... is it CPU or disk activity or memory or what? Identify what is wrong with Task Manager and you will be much closer to fixing it.
If its coming from random processes... injecteD DLLs live in all processes and thus bugs in them can appear in any random process since the DLL is present in all of them. My personal example is WindowBlinds, which has had some compatibility problems... Visual Studio soared in CPU usage while idle, the last time I used it. A while ago there was a problem where Google Desktop would eat up memory until it crashed if Windowblinds was in use on the system. Use autoruns to check for such DLLs and disable any that belong to apps you don't use, and temporarily disable apps that you are using (such as Windowblinds).
The disk check idea earlier in the page is a good idea too.
As for ideas it might be automatic defragmenting, I looked into the way defragmenting works on NT a while ago to try and figure out if having files open is still a no-no when defragmenting a drive (it's not, the clusters can still be moved, yay) and I found out Vista's defragmenting task is low-priority process and IO... meaning it can't be the cause, as it will defer to anything else on the system that needs process or IO time. You wouldn't notice it running.
I suspect your computer might have Windows on it. Good luck!
Not a lot to go on, though as a freebie, XP doesn't do jack with that extra gig of RAM...You could put in 100gigs and it won't use any more than 3 (less you're using the 64 bit version, iirc).
true, but 4GB is SOO cheap now its silly not to get 4GB.
Plus i believe you still benefit from dual channel DDR even if the OS can't use the other half of the space.
Why diagnose? Just reinstall as usual.
If your computer isn't occasionally doing something like it has a mind of its own, you are not doing your job as a geek. I view computers, from hardware on up through software, as something to be driven into the ground. Any computer can be taught sentience, with enough 2am scripts that you cron up or schedule and then forget about, like that time you installed every open source database server one night and sorta forgot about it...and enough weird processes that you've let go on and on.... as long as you can write code with it, keep launching, scripting, databasing, whatever, until your computer must be abandoned, all your intermediate work discarded with it, and you begin your struggle, and your life, anew, with a brand new PC.
This is my sig.
I went through a similar experience recently with my Windows XP machine - tore my hair out going step-by-step through every possible cause.
It happened after the out of schedule Windows update. Turns out that Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, turned on my McAfee real-time virus scanner. I't brought my system to a crawl whenever I'd try to play World of Warcraft. I didn't show up anything on Process Explorer and my video worked great, but my latency would slowly spiral out of control until it became uplayable.
I suspect that the real-time scanner was trying to process all inbound trafic before allowing it to pass on the calling process and it just couldn't keep up with the data bandwidth. Even disabling various McAfee security services didn't fix it - only uninstalling McAfee worked. Now my system runs better than ever (after having defragged a dozen times, uninstalled every unnecessary process imaginable, and cleaned the exhast fans).
Long story short - uninstall your virus software.
Sincerely,
A Chinese Hacker
All your base are belong to us!
VirtualPC? I think thats a bit overkill for the average windows user. If you do suspect that its a rootkit, try booting your PC with a Linux LiveCD and see how fast it runs. If it runs fine, then chances are you have an invasive rootkit. Then take LinuxGeek's advice and backup your data and reinstall.
I just did this the other day and found one of my sticks had 1000+ errors on it.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
User maintains more than a dozen sockpuppet accounts on Slashdot.
Open a command prompt and type "OPTIMIZE" and hit the Enter or Return key (doesn't matter which).
If you get an error, type "OVERRIDE" or "SECURITY OVERRIDE" and then try the optimize command again.
Make sure you type these in all-caps (it's best just to leave the caps lock key on all the time, really).
After the optimization sequence is complete, reboot your computer. The best way to do this is to simply pull the power plug on the back of the machine and then plug it back in. Do this a few times just to make sure it's rebooted everything correctly.
If this doesn't work, go online from another computer and buy a Mac or something from Dell.
The process causing the slowness, oddly does not spike the CPU. What it DOES do, is increase disk activity, which can bring many systems to a crawl.
Adding CPU/RAM will not help.
Typically, its the antivirus software. The process itself is not CPU intensive, but its disk intensive nature has brought 4 GB RAM, Dual Xeon machines to such slow performance that UG (UniGraphics) users would lose their licenses (and a morning's worth of work - in an entire department) because of it.
Many people still live in the more/faster CPU/RAM mentality. Current hardware is rarely to blame for a slow Winders system. Windows use of RAM does not make your system any faster by having more of it. If you have 1 GB of RAM, you're probably not using half of it in regular usage with XP. Adding another 3 GB won't make your system a microsecond faster. What it will do is enable you to open very large files (> 2 GB in size) without crashing the application trying to open the file (like UG . . .).
Find out what's causing your disk activity and you will be well on your way. Problem is, its likely the antivirus software that launches it and few companies will permit you to disable that.
Slow computer @ slashdot /= news for nerds. Stuff that matters.
Really, Get off of my computer... I officially would like to state I will NEVER read slashdot again for letting this get into the main stream.
Good Bye, I will miss the days when you actually counted for something in my life.
Oh how sad that last statement really sounds.
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
Whenever I see this happen, I fire up the task manager and sure enough, my arch-nemesis, the System Idle Process is there, taking up the bulk of the CPU time. Whenever I try to remove it, I get a message saying that the operation is not valid for this process. Kudos to whomever wrote this virus. Nothing seems to detect it, and nothing seems to be able to remove it.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I've experienced this problem first hand with an old Dell Dimension 4700C that I had received refurbished. What would happen was that when I first installed XP, the computer would boot up fine with no problems. However, after about a month or so, I'd experience sudden and drastic processor usage. Using Process Explorer, I found that the "process" killing my processor was the "SYSTEM." I really couldn't find a fix for a very long time, and I was left with a computer that required me to manually suspend and resume threads (to use USB and reboot!) that was very fragile when it came to new software. About 4-5 months ago, a friend and I were adding new hardware to my computer and he suggested I disconnected it if I was having USB troubles. I'm not unaware if it was a manufacture defect or because of the previous owner, but there was definitely a big problem with the front-panel USB ports. Apparently (I'm not so hardware savvy, so pardon any assumed mistakes I may make) according to windows, the USB ports were drawing too much power from the motherboard (or the motherboard couldn't supply enough power?). Anyway, my fix was to go in and disconnect the USB ports and after that everything has worked just fine, as expected. Also, apologies if this was a bit of a ramble. Hope this helps.
Does it have Limewire installed and no AV?
Iiiiiiittttttttttt's
Wipe and reinstall time,
wipe and reinstall time,
wipe and reinstall time,
wipe and reinstall time,
Wipe and reinstall!
Wipe and reinstall!
Wipe and reinstall with a BASEBALL BAT!
I use Windows... like a two dollar wh.. why don't I just go ahead and not finish that sentence.
I'm AC so this will probably never get modded so anyone will read it but I've had a weird problem where windows practically freezes for 30 seconds or so, then unfreezes, processes pretty much everything I clicked on during the previous 30 seconds then freezes again. This can continue after reboot so I assumed it was a heat problem and installed an extra fan, but to no avail.
TBH this happens very infrequently (maybe 1 a month) and a common factor seems to be very long firefox sessions (several days) followed by a period of heavy browsing. Shutting down a few minutes fixes it and my box could usually do with a reboot anyway.
Specs
Core 2 quad core
4GB ram
9600 512Mb (?)
Vista (every XP install i've tried bluescreens can't be bothered to find a fix)
... is it Virturex?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Removing all of those will only make the computer run even slower, won't it?
(I kid, I kid.)
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Try booting in safe mode. See if the system is still slow. If it is, chances are you have a hardware config problem. I actually had an S-ata IRQ conflict once. If it runs fast, you probably have some ressource hog hidden somewhere. In the case of the later, open up process explorer or task manager and watch your cpu utilisation. If it stays low and your computer is slow, there's a resource fight in progress. Probably a process latched to where it's not supposed to be. If it is high, you can easily identify the offending software. In procexp or task manager, look at your total i/os per process. You may find the culprit there. Finally if that fails. Look for any anti-virus. They have caused me more headaches than the actual visuses. You may wish to disable it and see if your computer revives.
I applaud your courage on posting a windows question here.
HijackThis has helped me out a few times as well. Certainly not for the novice, though.
-=-=-=-=-=
HijackThis lists the contents of key areas of the Registry and hard drive--areas that are used by both legitimate programmers and hijackers. The program is continually updated to detect and remove new hijacks. It does not target specific programs and URLs, only the methods used by hijackers to force you onto their sites.
As a result, false positives are imminent, and unless you're sure about what you're doing, you always should consult with knowledgeable folks before deleting anything. Version 2.0.2 includes unspecified updates.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Another follow up question to this one - suppose one does keep diskmon and filemon in the background. Is there some list of "reasonable" access that one could capture and run the mon logs against?
When your a team of one and have numerous resources to monitor - your life is this constant set of priority choices. Do I learn Spring or Struts 2? Choose a new distro like Ubuntu, or start learning how to write perl scripts against Fedora? This is just one more example of "learn this one more thing." If your not afraid to RTFM - you get along quite nicely in this field - but which manual to read? That's the more relevant question.
And back to this question - which manual to read to learn enough about what's happening internally to be able to make an educated hypothesis of the logs. And more importantly - which logs should we read?
I recently took my son's computer in to be looked at. It ran really slowly, and the WinXP Task Manager showed constant 100% CPU usage. The problem was that the power supply fan and CPU fan hadn't been cleaned in a *long* time and the CPU was running really hot. They cleaned it, and it is running fast again.
IF you eliminate hardware, the next question is what did you install? Or Modify? Or what was updated?
Did you install a video game which installed StarForce non plug in play DRM drivers? That can slow you down.
Did you install WinZip or Notepad++ or anything else which added explorer enhancements? Those can slow you down when they conflict with each other.
Did you install iTunes and have the Upper/Lower filter drivers modified & conflicting with your Nero or Roxio upper/lower filters?
Did you get a partial zip file downloaded which is causing your antivirus software to go into a loop?
Filemon/Regmon (Procmon) can tell you these things, but you really have to know what you are looking at.
I finally got fed up with these issues and switched to a Mac a bit over a year ago. No more debugging a crappy OS for me. At least not at home.
I love how half the comments in this thread would normally be rated as trolls... but since we all realize the fact that windows is crap, they're rated funny instead.
When mine did a few weeks ago, it turned out to be because it updated itself to XP Service Pack 3.
Removing XP3, and installing the "critical security updates" as per Microsoft's tech support document on the subject, fixed the problem and got everything working back the way it was originally.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
With the recent downadup worm, sbybot failed to remove it for me. bleepingcomputer.com - combofix worked like a charm, however. I also heard malwarebytes worked good on it as well, but have not used it personally. Combofix would even clean an infected thumb drive if you ran it on the system with the drive plugged in.
With the downadup worm, AVG would detect it on a thumb drive, but still let it infect the OS even if you tried to heal it. It also could not remove it completely even ran from safe mode. It would find things, but say it was unable to remove them.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
the hell people allow ghost turds (name for dust, in US Navy parlance) to build up in a computer. To me, it's like taking a dump and over time never cleaning ones butt.
Eventually, as with a fan clogging up (especially in cyclically dry-then-humid locales) and sputtering and thunking/clunking, computer dust balls act as perianal sand or paste and will grind to a halt even the most strong of computer fan "gaits". So, grab an air can, and when the hardware and blow it good (out doors so you don't choke the hell out of yourself or others...). Also, get soft cloth or Q-tips and clean the blades to reduce chance of bearing grind due to imbalance caused by non-symmetry of axial spin/rotation. Ohterwise, the computer could suffer sub-thermal dustmatoma...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Literally and figuratively.
If it isn't a virus or hardware issue, perhaps you have too many memory resident programs loaded?
At the Start menu click "Run" and then type in "msconfig" it will allow you to see what services, processes, and start up programs are in use. Naturally you want your Antivirus to load at startup but not your instant messenger programs and other useless junk that clutter up CPU cycles and system memory. Get rid of a few startup programs first and then reboot and see if the system speed improves.
It could be a corrupted registry and that link is to Microsoft's site on how to troubleshoot that.
If you cannot resolve the speed problem that way you might have a bad system file or files that went corrupt.
First make sure that you have:
#1 The original XP install CD without any service packs.
#2 The slipstreamed XP install CD with the same service pack you are using.
Click Start and select "Run" and type in "sfc /checknow" and have those CDs ready when prompted for them.
Sfc is the system file checker and oddly enough it needs a non-service pack XP CD and an XP CD with your service pack on it. Best to make the slipstreamed version with SP2 or SP3 whatever you are using on it first. I hope you have the non-SP version of XP, if not borrow it from someone who does have it. This could be a tricky process but sometimes it works, but you need to reinstall all security patches after it runs.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
And I don't normally engage in grammar fights, but seriously twitter, you misspelled 'botnet' three times?
Botnet. Not that hard, is it?
Why be slaughtered with the other sheep?
*yawn*, your kind of annoying advocacy is quickly going out of style, you know.
I've had large 2GB+ processes (i.e. VMWware) slow down my system due to being constantly swapped out of the 2GB user memory space.
There was no obvious offensive metric that would have clued me into this. The solution was to increase the user memory space to 3GB.
Fire up Sysinternals Tcpview and look for processes generating unusual traffic. Look for new connections coinciding with the perceived slowdown. Note the pid in tcpview then fire up Sysinternals Process Explorer and look for that pid - you'll be able to drill down and see exactly what file is running. This way instead of only seeing svchost.exe, for example, is doing weird things, you can see what files svchost has called.
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
A very interesting way to solve the case of a slow system by Mark Russinovich
http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2008/09/24/3126858.aspx
... drop
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
No you're not. Xp only uses the first 3 GB of RAM.
Windows Bug
If removing the network cable suddenly speeds things up, then, you're the victim of an unknown Windows bug. For example, when you right-click in Windows Explorer, does it sometimes hang?
Also, is this a computer that's run on more than one network? This happens especially on laptops that have visitied multiple lans (including your home)
You PC's Registry, or something, has Vestiges of Pointers to network resources (not just shared drives) but Icons, things it thinks are out on the network but are not there anymore. You have to wait for the time-out to finish before you have response.
I believe this is also causing slowness in general when these timeouts are in series. Just an boatload of waiting for network things it will never find.
I completely wrote my own Window Explorer where every resource request is done in it's own thread. Any thread that doesn't complete within 1 second is ferociuosly killed. End result, I have my own custom Explorer and no delays. Doesn't have all the bells and whistles, so I haven't shared it.
This really sucks... Best of all! None of the Registry Cleaner Tools, spyware tools will solve this.
We've found in our managed environment that when our WSUS server starts pushing out Windows Updates, it can sometimes drop people to a crawl as well. Sometimes everyone, sometimes just a few. Not as big of an issue on a private connection, but can lag out your interwebz a bit. Run "net stop BITS" in a command prompt, and if it suddenly flies again, something is using the Background (Un)intelligent Transfer service and murdering the PC. (which is usually Windows Updates or occasionally MSN Explorer. (does anyone actually use that still?)
We all clean our computers regularly, right? I noticed this on an offloaded pc I cleaned up to pass on. The processor fan and cooling vents was heavily caked in dust and it was clocking slower so it would not heat up so much. Cleaning the dust off the processor cured the problem.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
don't for get the full price of windows in that quote.
http://consumerist.com/5048382/why-i-quit-staples-easy-tech
Diagnosing a suddenly slow system is easy - you're bound to notice that it's slow all of a sudden after a while.
Of course diagnosing the cause of the sudden slow system is another matter entirely...
np: The Whitest Boy Alive - Done With You (Dreams)
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
Some applications, even after being uninstalled leave behind crap that will slow you down. I don't entirely know how to describe it, since I'm not sure what's going on behind the scenes, but here's what I do:
.pst files or anything you might think is important in "C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings" and "C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data" -- usually things used by Firefox and Outlook, etc. For the most part applications will rebuild from scratch.
1. Reboot the machine and log on as administrator (NOT your own account).
2. Rename your old profile -- "C:\Documents and Setting\username" -- to something like "C:\Documents and Settings\username.OLD" (you can't do this if you're logged on as "username" or if you haven't rebooted since you were).
3. Log off admin and log on as yourself. Windows will automatically create a fresh profile for you.
4. Open up applications (Firefox/MS Outlook/etc...) and see how it fares.
5. If it's looking good, go ahead and retrieve stuff from your old profile like your desktop folder and My Documents, or
If that doesn't do it, you could try some sort of registry cleaner, but if you're at that point I'd rather just reinstall Windows. Alternatively swap out for a hard drive from another computer. And if THAT doesn't work, then you know it's a hardware issue.
I had a bad performance drop in my laptop a few weeks ago that I found it to be a battery failiure.. It went nuts trying to charge the dead battery, running on DC. I tried removing the battery and all was solved (exept portability...)
Not very useful info if your on a desktop, though, but still.
In my experience, when something like that happens, it's because of something the end user did that anyone experienced with a computer wouldn't think of. For example, last week I had someone ask me to fix their computer. It had been working just fine but then all of a sudden it slowed to an absolute crawl. I mean it was realllllyyy slow. I went through everything only to find out that they had tried to send a 2GB attachment in Outlook and that was basically causing the whole system to hang. So, you have to dumb down your thinking often to find some problems.
Top offenders:
(1) Your hard disk gets a few bad blocks in commonly used directories, such as windows\system32 and the hard disk substitutes blocks way out on the edge.
(2) You have TeaTimer or McAfee or Norton or a combination of those all running.
(3) A virus or rootkit or dangling reference to a network drive.
It's a managed environment. This reduces the question to "will I be sure to get my data and unauthorized programs back after IT services is done dumping a new install on it?".
I have become an expert at telling people that their computer is slow because they're using twice as much RAM as their computer has, and therefore swapping badly. I usually tell them that they need 4 times as much RAM as they have.
I think this is not your problem.
Use HijackThis. Bleeping computer has a tutorial which links to tools you can use to look up process and service names. It's essentially a registry tool that displays keys are often exploited (your startup list, BHO's, services, things like that), though it does several other handy things as well.
.iso for a bootable disk that will do a more thorough test. I'd make a backup first.
It's also a great way to simply boost performance by cleaning up unnecessary startup items and services, but use it with care, most of the things it displays are totally supposed to be there.
If HijackThis looks clean then your system is probably not infected and you should check the hard drive, chkdisk might tell you something, but the manufacturer probably provides an
is there an analog for this on the mac. I keep getting spikes in finder usage and long spinning beach balls when almost nothing is going on.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Sometimes the Event Viewer is a bit of a hit and miss, but if there's anything big from Windows that's crapping out, it should log something in the Event Viewer.
Check Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Event Viewer.
Rootkits can run in kernel space, and can fool process explorer/task manager that they are there: they don't show up in the process table. Some of these things are really nasty. I always recommend complete reinstall if the computer 'suddenly' becomes slow. (Of course, reinstall with the network unplugged until you can install all the service packs, and install antivirus/FW, or better, behind a REAL (hardware) firewall). After that, everything is smooth again.
"Could this be a very clever virus that doesn't run as a process?" Yes! But it's not. Can that be done? Yes. Can it be hidden from AV software? Yes, entirely, and it's done as common practice in some circles. You have many writable 'media' on your computer from video card BIOS to drive controllers, to anything with a flash BIOS with a little bit of bloat. Malware (define as you wish) can live on any of those, and they can even be aggregated to provide larger storage areas that will survive not only a reinstall but a drive swap. Can, and has, been done.
After many years of watching this happen, it -may- be the following:
A windows update occurs.
For whatever reason, despite everything/everyone saying this should/could/would never happen, a newer, more recent driver is replaced by an older driver provided by Microsoft.
The system slows right down, largely due to "generic" drivers for things like video, sound, or in particular drive controllers and my all time favorite, motherboard chipsets.
So, things to check?
Are you using the OEM provided drivers for sound, video, SATA/IDE controller and motherboard chipset? Have they recently been replaced? Did an update just occur?
If not, go and download this: http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml ... and check for deferred procedure calls of a volume that are indicative of very very bad drivers (which may be in place due to the above). I've seen drivers written so badly on a brand new XP SP3 system they will have real-time sound & video dropouts caused entirely due to DPC latency in the dozens of milliseconds.
For reference, my current system, with that tool, shows a modal DPC latency of 2 microseconds. yes, that's 2, not 20, not 200, not 20000. Two. A system with proper drivers should NEVER EVER EVER go above the 500 microsecond "green" limit.
Manufacturers such as Acer (and their ilk) are particularly bad for this, especially during the time period (and since) when laptops were offered with both Vista and XP. The XP drivers were/are absolute junk, and the resulting the performance is hideous. In some cases, using OLDER drivers provides relief, but sometimes, you have no choice but to install Linux and run XP in a VM. :|
I'm sure the poster already knows advanced troubleshooting.
I see these sort of problems also on my vista machine.
mysterious slowdowns not seemingly caused by anything.
no process is eating resources. It's mysterious. I reboot and the problem goes away. If I didn't play games, I'd install opensuse.
They're using their grammar skills there.
That's about it.
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
I have no idea how this can happen.
PS: Thanks for 3 GB of RAM.
Open Source Alternatives
This generally happens when there is some resource and something has installed a hook onto it. (Like a TSR for you old folks) The hook code is only executed at certain times, depending on the nature of the hook. IRQs have hooks (Anyone remember IRQs?) but also windows supports additional hooks like for virusscan., Filemon, Procmon, etc.
Given that everyone here (well the modded-up posts anyway) is suspecting a hardware disk issue, I think it's your virus scan.
Re-install it or switch. Its probable that an engine update is not to nice on your CPU.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
I've seen machines do this when the cpu fan malfunctioned. The fan was replaced but the system began periodically locking up. Problem solved with a new cpu.
the diagnose is: the computer has the windows
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Have you tried Dial a Fix? http://wiki.lunarsoft.net/wiki/Dial-a-fix It does some useful cleanup.
Was it before or after you installed the animated unicorn desktop theme you saw in a banner ad?
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
I've experienced strange issues with Windows having unusual spikes in activity for no apparent reason, and traced it back to an on-board VIA network interface of the motherboard. I disabled the on-board NIC (both in Windows and in BIOS), put in a new PCI-based NIC card, and the problem was solved. The slowdown was pretty wretched (mouse wouldn't even update position during movement) for 1-2 seconds before it had about 1 second of responsiveness.
I've also had very similar problems happen with Realtek PCI gigabit adapters, both under Windows & Linux, on different systems. The slowdown wasn't nearly as bad as the previous example, but it was noticable (I would describe it as a consistent slugginess rather than a spikey periodic unresponsiveness). Swapping the Realtek adapters for Intel adapters immediately solved the problem. I don't know if it was a driver option/configuration issue (I just left everything default), but it happened under *both* Windows (2000 & XP at the time) and Linux. And it it was with two different Realtek-based NICs, from totally different vendors, on entirely different machines.
Ever since these multiple occasions occurred, I usually shy away from the cheap NIC chipsets and stick with Intel or Broadcom when possible.
finally fast dot com
doesn't anyone watch cable tv late at night? oh god the commercial haunts my dreams
I've seen behaviour like this caused by a dodgy USB device. A random process would spike and if you killed that, another one would spike in it's place. This was under windows XP. I tracked down the offending device by systematically removing things till the problem went away. Once it was removed there were no further problems. I'm guessing it was windows I/O system not coping well with the hardware problem.
Similarly, try going through any other things that might have changed around the time you started seeing the problem. The device in question also caused problems under Linux.
---- Backwards compatible -- If it's not backwards it's not compatible
Why nothing could be easier. Back up your data and then reboot from the Ubuntu install disk.
Why bother. I keep up to date images for all my hardware and, at the first whiff of trouble, it's bye bye birdy.
There's just not a huge list of reasons to dick with this stuff any more. Yeah, you might learn the attack vector, then you might be able to manually remove the nasty little bugger that's got you slowed down and patch against future intrusion. Or, you can start from scratch and move on with your life after an hour or so. Besides, if it is hardware, it'll be pretty apparent after you've reloaded (if you can reload at all.)
I no longer care what crapware my users have managed to infest themselves with. Ghost the machine, move on to genuinely interesting problems.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
I thought that's what a condom was: a virtual machine for sex.
Most people are giving loose suggestions, here's my attempt at providing a walkthrough:
First try and identify the symptoms better. From reading the summary it probably isn't CPU or memory exhaustion. If it is elevated disk usage, the simples give-away would be the LED on your computer being constantly on (perhaps flickering). Run perfmon, as other have suggested, just to be sure. Check temperatures as well.
If the problem is one of the above, things get easier. Find which process is eating up IO/memory/CPU, and you're done.
If nothing jumps out, it could be a rootkit or it could be hardware. Try a GNU/Linux live CD, see how it runs. If it runs fine under some load, it's probably not CPU or memory. There's still disk left, but if the LED wasn't going crazy it probably wasn't the cause. Still, I guess you check with hdparm or dd if of=/dev/null, or something.
If all runs fine it was, it's a rootkit. Good luck there.
If there's still a problem, it's probably hardware. Then it's a bigger problem, but at least you know what it is. I won't go into detail here.
Good luck.
Okay, the usual checklist goes like this:
1. check for malware - you've already done this.
2. check for a failing hard disk, by running the HDD manufacturer's diagnostic tool or Spinrite
3. if there's no failure, try clearing out your temp folders and run a defrag
4. if it's still chugging, it just might be time to start over with a fresh OS install. Sure, you could troubleshoot for days or even weeks, but a reinstall takes a few hours to a day at most. Remember to back up your data, or better yet install to a new hard drive and copy your documents over.
All you Linux troll-wannabes about to bash the defrag, shut the fuck up! Run a few torrents, watch your disk I/O drop to a tenth of its nominal performance within a week, and you'll see that ext3 is not immune to fragmentation, no better or worse than NTFS. *ANY* I/O-intensive machine benefits from a defrag once in a while, there's no filesystem in the world that can avoid it, not unless it uses multi-gigabyte write cache to sort sectors in-flight, because some loads just aren't filesystem-friendly.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Remove Zip drive software if no drive is connected. Check the CPU fan. Scan, scan, scan like mentioned above.
1. Check your event log. Look at both application and security event logs in event viewer. See if there is any correlation between logged events and slowdown. Check if you're getting any Hard Disk or IO errors.
2. If you're running Alcohol or Daemon Tools check to see if they're loading images at startup across the network. If they are unmount the images. Remember your
3. Unplug all your USB devices and reboot. A faulty USB device can and will cause lockups, slowdowns and crashes.
4. Unplug your network (as suggested by another slashdotter). If slowdowns increase, some piece of software is holding onto a file across the network and when it becomes unavailable Windows will sit there waiting for it to return until a timeout.
5. Another slashdotter suggested checking your drives with a SMART utility. Great idea. Also run chkdsk on each partition. Also run memtest86 or similar to test system memory. Any hardware diagnostic software that came with your motherboard or system should also be run. If nothing came with your system find a freeware hardware diagnostic program.
6. Procmon's was suggested by another slashdotter. Another great tool. Before you learn to use it though display all the columns in your standard task manager process list. Look at what's using the most resources. Not just CPU. Look at memory, file handles, and GDI objects in particular but also threads and look at what's doing IO.
7. Start up in safe mode with networking. See if you still have a problem.
8. Use msconfig to disable programs run at startup and reboot. See if that fixes the problem. If it does, slowly re-enable software in small groups until you narrow down which processes are the cultprits
9. If you're concerned about malware run netstat -o after a fresh boot and see if your PC is making any connections to weird sources. Also run hijackthis!
10. If you're overclocking, turn off the overclock and see if that fixes it. Even if you're not overclocking, resetting your BIOS to defaults can weird and wonderful bugs. (I once had a memory pool leak on my laptop that would crash it after at most 24 hours and a BIOS reset was the only thing that worked in the end). See if there are any BIOS updates for your motherboard but be aware that a BIOS upgrade is a risk. Make sure you can revert and make sure you don't do it if you don't have reliable power.
11. Switch off the machine. Open up the case and carefully clean your CPU and GPU heatsink and any other accumulated dust. Dust can accumulate and increase the temp of the CPU, making it flakey. Make sure you know what you're doing so you don't hose the machine. Plenty of info online but if you're unsure get a more hardware savvy friend to help.
12. If you have a video card to swap in, try that. I've seen bad video cards cause all sorts of instability.
If none of the above helps, at some point you'll need to cut your losses and start fresh. Reinstalling even a monster of a system will only take a few man days of effort whereas troubleshooting a hosed config is open ended. If you're spending too much time and your system isn't usable, rebuild it.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Actually, while I do somehow sped more time at home on my Windows gaming box than under Linux (so this isn't a blanket Windows bashing,) my superficial and uninformed impression was that, all else being equal, any Windows box I've seen seems harder hit by IO than any Linux/Unix box I've ever seen.
Yes, you can get a Linux box to crawl too, if the hard drive is stuffed and it can't swap for example. Or if the chipset isn't supported well by the drivers. (Rarer these days, but certainly possible.) Or whatever.
But Windows... seems a bit special. I mean try to copy a directory between two hard drives, or better yet from a DVD to HDD, and Windows seems to me basically stuffed. Even notepad can get about as responsive as a narcoleptic snail. And you can just about forget about, say, playing a game while that happens.
And that's before you even add such brakes as an anti-virus.
I've seen that behaviour in any Windows, from 3.0 to Vista, including a detour through NT 4.0. In fact in Vista let's just say there's a reason why so many people were pissed off at the indexer kicking in all the time.
My subjective impression is that I've yet to see Linux get anywhere near that unresponsive, in a similar scenario. Again, assuming that you don't have a nearly dead HDD and the chipset is supported in DMA mode.
But heck, even in PIO mode, I've used Linux in PIO mode and I've used, say, NT in PIO mode. (Thanks to a retarded IT department which installed the wrong IDE drivers.) Linux did obviously have poor file IO performance, but NT just freaking _froze_ for a second or two, for example, when minimizing or maximizing a window. (Presumably due to aggressive memory management which swapped more of a process out when minimized.)
Now admittedly I haven't actually programmed an OS at any point, so I'm probably talking out the arse, but I see no reason why that should happen at all. Any common source of IOWait has an interrupt. Even in PIO mode you don't have to poll until it's done. And DMA, now that was invented for the precise reason and purpose of transferring some data while the CPU services another process. It's why it's there. So there's no freaking reason for the whole OS to just twiddle its thumbs and wait. Even if one process is waiting for _paging_, you can still yield to another process while waiting for the HDD.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
On my last full-time XP box, I could not run Visual Studio with AV (Sophos) enabled. This persisted into some other apps, but was most notable with this. If the system became available enough to *see* a diag tool/window, there wasn't a problem, when it 'hung', task mgr hung with it. I doubt this is the problem for what's been presented, but it's worth checking. Turn off your AV, and see if it speeds up.
Yeah, we all like Linux because it doesn't do annoying things like this
Speaking as someone who uses Linux at work every day, this is a flat-out lie.
Most of the previous suggestions are more likely and better but I figured I'd also mention this. I've heard of people with undiscovered rootkits and a symptom is huge, seemingly untraceable performance loss. The only symptom is a lot of different, legitimate processes using up the CPU at the same time. This behavior is a known effect of some rootkits using CPU cycles while hiding itself. I've never seen it personally but I've heard about it. I'd suggest running Rootkit Revealer because it checks for any inconsistency between the registry and what's supposedly there for the entire file system and processes that are running (or something like that) instead of using a list of virus definitions.
Also, nothing stops a computer like a piece of hardware telling everything to wait. Go to the actual manufacturer's page for every piece of significant hardware and update the driver for it. You'll be surprised how many are described as critical fixes but don't appear on windows update. And there's a lot of lines in the changelogs that will say something to the effect of "fixed system hang/pause when..."
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
1. Check the System event log for errors from source "Disk". If you see a bunch of failed writes and sector relocations, it's time to get a new drive.
2. Check the DMA status of your drive as the first post said.
3. Your system may have ran out of virtual memory and increased (and fragmented) the pagefile. Change the size of the pagefile from whatever it is to min 2000 MB / max 2000 MB so it will never grow (and fragment) again. Check the System event log for entries about that and download the Sysiternals PageDefrag tool. You may have to delete some stuff and run a normal defrag to free up enough contiguous disk space in order to defrag the pagefile.
technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897426.aspx
4. If you have IE6, set a small browser cache size, like 128MB. Once the cache gets too large, IE starts to spend too much time looking for items in the cache. Better yet, upgrade to IE7 and Firefox 3.x.
5. Clear the prefetch cache as someone else said.
6. Suck it up and spend a weekend re-installing everything. j/k. /djs
autoruns is one of my favorite tools for finding malware and such. It is part of the sysinternals suite. It basically shows you how any program at any point in time on a windows machine can be triggered to run. Its actually a pretty interesting tool, a lot more useful than msconfig or something like that. But yeah, filemon and process explorer are also what you want to use.
Also I second looking at mark russonovich's blog. He is a window genius and very easy to learn from. I'm pretty sure he could solve any windows problem that anyone has ever had.
Is this just one rogue machine in a pool of identical machines? If so, re-image it and see if the problem persists or if any other machines have the same problem.
Has a lot more functionality than flashblocker and their ilk, and will defeat the VAST majority of browser based attacks as well.
Plus it has some slightly more flexible options for configuration, etc.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Spyware generally won't show in your process list anymore and the latest generation of spyware must all be manually cleaned.
You can fight it and maybe eventually win but in most cases you are better off backing up your data and reinstalling windows.
I don't see many viruses anymore, spyware is the most likely.
The diagnostic is "Windows".
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Use Task Manager, Processes tab and investigate any processes that have low CPU usage and continually rising "I/O Other" byte counts.
Biggest thing people seem to miss is to ask NON TECHNICAL questions in dealing with an issue like this. How long has it been doing this? When did you notice it start happening? Is it just yours that is slow, etc. Use the half step approach and eliminate big things, like someone else said disconnect the network cable, or maybe try it in safe mode, or anything that eliminates a lot of possibilities to rapidly narrow the scope of the issue. Apart from antivirus, antispyware, autoruns, atf cleaner to autofix messes, you can try task manager & perfmon.msc, sysinternals process monitor and process explorer, win32 api monitor, defrag, hardware diagnostics or whatever diagnostic tools your troubleshooting leads you. Don't be guided by tools alone, use your head or someone elses if your brain is defective. Don't spend too much time working on crap if a simple reimage will resolve the issue. Don't have an image for a PC? Make sure to capture one the next time you build it. If it works with a clean image then it is probably something you did. Stop hosing your PC. I actually had a guy the other day who installed itunes on his server and filled up his disk because he needed to charge it from something, and was too lazy to buy a dang charger. 99% of all users are idiots, and everyone (myself included) have fallen into that sad majority at some point. You know you probably frakked it up dude. Stop tripping and reimage it already.
When did you last defrag, clean cache files, or clean your registry ?
Turn off system restore reboot then run a good defrag program. Make sure you make a new system restore after defrag.
I had this problem with my 266mhz PII recently with Windows 95. I took it to GeekSquad and they recommended:
Ram Upgrade
New HD
Install Windows XP
New Graphics card
New 7.1 surround sound audio card
New Speakers so I can hear the 7.1 surround sound
New PSU because they said the graphics card needs a lot of Watts!
Wireless Keyboard and Mouse
Virus Protection software install
Spyware Protection software install
Firewall install
Online Automated Data Backup service
Data Transfer to transfer my old files to the new HD they sold me
Now it runs great!!
The best $3000.00 I've ever invested!!
and everything was fine, until one day â" it wasn't. I've run spybot, antivirus, and looked at proc explorer â" no luck.
there you go
I don't use windows daily, but I have windows box for games. And what I do, to avoid having to waste endless hours investigating this sort of stuff, is maintaing fresh images of my hard drive.
Simply keep OS and installed programs on C: drive, back up its entire image often. Something happens, wipe it and put _stable_ image over it.
I suggest Acronis True Image Maker.
o_O
Re-boot, Re-install, Re-format.
This is an inherantly impossible question to answer.
"Hey Doc, I felt fine until I didn't."
How many things could go wrong? Well, two I guess. Hardware, or software.
Did a fan fail?
Is a hard drive failing?
Is there a memory fault?
Did you hit the "turbo" button (get off your 386, hehe)?
Do you have [mal|spy|ad]ware that you don't know about?
Did a Windows setting get changed?
Is it network related?
Are you just overwhelming your machine?
Oddly enough, I've seen Windows PC's, where the owners set their own DNS servers to somewhere pathetically slow or down. It wasn't just the Internet that went slow, but everything. That's probably because so many applications call home now. They were hanging trying to call home, and instead of going to sleep like they should have, they'd stay busy, and make the whole system busy.
This problem isn't something that can be diagnosed by a posting.
A friend called me. "My server crashed twice today. What's wrong?" Good question. I told her I wanted to shut it down and pull the cover off, so I could have a peek inside. She didn't want me to. I suggested it may be a failing fan, hard drive, etc, etc. She insisted I install some tools, rather than just pop the cover off. I tried. The machine crashed about 2 minutes in.
I took the opportunity to pop the cover. The CPU fan had failed. Beyond that, the motherboard must have been going, probably from the heat. After changing the fan, it wouldn't power back on. I moved her drives to the most similar spare machine I could. It wasn't similar enough. Windows wouldn't boot because of the differences in the motherboard. {sigh} One in-place upgrade later, a few dozen updates, and shes running.
So, what's wrong with your PC? If I have to base it on my most recent experience, I'd say your CPU fan is gone, and your motherboard is about to go. Really though, we need an awful lot of information to even give a good guess.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
But windows will never run as fast as when you first installed it, and if the time for diagnosis, running and downloading antispyware/malware/rootkit/virus/registry cleaning/defragging/etc exceeds the time to do a fresh install then you might as well do a fresh install.
Like others have said here look at hardrive and memory problems, and if those are not the problem then start doing other diagnosis or just do a reinstall.
horrible answer but seriously, it's too much trouble. it happens way too often. just make a good disk image that you can revert to and have your files backed up. i remember wanting to find out what the trouble was with certain problems on windows boxes but the truth is there are far too many and they're not interesting ones to solve
I've had similar problems lately and used these two tools to get my XP back without reloading.
http://systemexplorer.mistergroup.org/
SE can do realtime performance of I/O Reads/Writes by process.
When windows gets I/O bound the system can grind to a halt and become unusable because of the way the windows XP kernel operates.
To eliminate bad spyware, this utility works great
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/home/index.html
-Enjoy!
You didn't mention the event logs. Did you check them? Throw any error messages at a search engine if you don't understand them.
Does the hard drive sound good? If you have a mechancial drive and you almost never hear the heads seek, you arean't close enough to diagnose. I've had to press my ear against a laptop before knowing the drive sounded bad. There should be no rhythmic "click-shuffle-click-pause-reapeat" sound. The bad hard drive sound is hard to describe but a repetitive pattern is a key ingredient.
Are there symptoms in safe mode? If no, the culprit isn't running in safe mode and finding it with brute force at this point isn't as bad as you may think. E.g. disable the startup section in msconfig and reboot. If the problem is gone then the problem is in the startup section. Otherwise, the problem is NOT in startup section and most likely in services. Either way you've just eliminated a large chunk of possibilities. If the problem looks like it is in startup, disable half of the startup items... get the idea? Everybody loves the binary search algorithm, right?
They can hide their processes. They can hide their files. They can protect the memory that they occupy. In order to properly detect these bad boys, you need to do an off-line scan. I recommend that you get comfy with UBCD. Integrate it with a very good virus scanner like Kaspersky and SpybotSD. This has always helped me to track down and eradicate the nastiest viruses, some of which could not be detected by those same scanners in a live running system.
You can use the defrag application provided in Windows xp/Vista/2000/me/98. A better defragment software that I use is called (jkdefrag)
http://www.kessels.com/Jkdefrag/
It defrags your harddrive AND it optimizes the file structure, so the HD runs faster. You can execute the app using cmd or run in windows gui.
I've had this frustrating problem several times and the answer is always that there is a [forgotten] music CD with buggy movie or copyright protection software in the disk drive. The CD or DVD is stuck in a random spin up / spin down / wait cycle. The task manager shows alternating 100% busy spikes and the system crawls.
I went through this same exercise on my laptop last year. I was thoroughly stumped until I finally noticed one day that I wasn't hearing a normal "whir" once it heated up. Sure enough, after downloading an Intel utility I found that the processor was heat-throttling itself down to 166MHz. Got the internal fan replaced and performance was back to normal.
Back in the days when I was a sinner running Windows I would see slowness and crashing when I had installed too many programs on a PC.
If one suffers from a diseased mind and simply can't resist Windows then the secret seems to be to simply limit the install to a small handful of programs that you use every day. But even so I suspect that you still will need a fresh install every year or so.
It worries me that upon seeing the dll name I knew it was a codec related issue, but it worries me even more knowing the product by the codec name (simply because I use a Blackberry).
Quack, quack.
and don't forget Process Monitor (replaces FileMon, RegMon, etc.)
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx
process explorer is great to see what's using CPU/RAM/etc. and what DLLs it's got loaded. It doesn't tell you anything about what files it's accessing, however.
For example - my WD USB drive refuses to 'safely remove' in Vista. It always claims it's in use. When I use Process Explorer, there doesn't seem to be anything going on. The drive isn't in use (open file handles, for example), there's no new processes spawned when I go to 'safely remove' the drive, etc.
But then I look at the Process Monitor and wouldn't you know.. scvhost.exe (an existing process) writes to "\system volume information\tracking.log" every time I go to 'safely remove'. 'safely remove' then decides for that fraction of a second that the drive is in use, and thus refuses to proceed.
So now at least I know why. Can't say I know how to fix it (disabling system restore did squat), but at least I changed the caching setting to disabled, meaning I can just yank the plug.
This is a scary thought that might be relevant. Wired recently published an interview with a repentant spyware author who mentioned that they had figured out how to run the virus as a series of discrete threads which are not running as part of any parent process, something that Windows evidently allows. He also stated that they considered using a completely threadless model, by installing the code as an interrupt handler. Just tie it to an interrupt that regularly fires, and their code runs in an utterly transparent manner - something Windows also allows. The guy claimed that they didn't actually do the interrupt trick. But the frightening think was that it is even possible. I have no doubt that someone will do it eventually.
Mir tut es leid, Menschen daß Einfältigfehlersuchenbaumfolgendenaffen sind.
Go Here or if you have some money to spend go here for a more user-friendly solution to your problem.
Two things to check: Hardware or software. Check your system logs for hardware problems - the hard drive error scenario was discussed above, but I've had a similar issue with a disk drive, where every second Windows would poll the device and get an error, causing slow halty performance.
For software causes, get GMER (http://www.gmer.net/index.php), this has a process list that gives precise kernel time used by each process, which gives you a good idea what is eating up your cp-ewe. If it is something more obvious, just start up taskmgr and sort by CPU usage and then memory usage and see if anything looks out of the ordinary.
I recently was having slow logon times and slightly sluggish performance. Didn't realize until I ran WireShark to debug a network issue that I had freenet running eating up resources/bandwidth (I'm behind NAT so I can't even help others by running a node so no point having it up when not in use).
First post!
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
[sarcasm]
Like one day all of a sudden mounting your root file system as read only simply because you commited the horrible sin of gracefully shutting down one night and powering up the next day?
Things like that?
Linux? Never!
[/sarcasm]
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I've had problems where DNS look ups seem to fail a lot. Click on a link or type something into the search box and Firefox will just sit there for a bit, throw up a page saying that it can't find the address of the website. I hit the retry button a couple of times and it will eventually come up. This is just for the windows machines, not the linux ones. Chrome will do the same thing.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
I thought that was default behavior.
First: put things in perspective. What is the effort estimate to diagnose and resolve the existing installation compared to a fresh install? Choose the lesser.
/scannow' on a cmd line with windows install cd in the drive.
Check all the common stuff:
Test HDD, RAM, CPU etc under load (there are a bunch of nice linux live CDs to help with this.
There are some really common issues within windows:
- corrupt system files: 'sfc
- Clear the page file: corrupt page file causes disk thrashing and very slow computer, plus virtual memory errors - also visible by that constantly on HDD light. You can also clear page file at shutdown via reg hack.
- Too much cruft: uninstall all the crap that you really don't need/use, maybe replace some software with alternatives.. not all virus scanners are alike.
Anyone familiar with troubleshooting systems knows that a process of elimination is 99% sure to locate the problem, unless its a result of several factors with no single nexus.
- Good luck
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Aircan? Try using a vacuum, and then the dust won't end up somewhere else in your area.
I have to vacuum out our home computers every 6 months, due to too many dogs in the house. It's pretty impressive how gummed up the heat sinks are when I open up the cases to do this.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
As a professional in the field of fixing this and other similar problems with PCs, I would have to say that the first thing to consider, is a fresh install of the operating system.
As a geek, that thought makes me cringe... because I want to fix it.
I was doing a bit of necessary research on a machine tonight, where every time it was updated to SP3 after a fresh install (heavy spyware/malware infected system, customer opted for the quicker format-reinstall instead of the longer cleaning) it would BSOD with a 0x07e. The fresh install was from a Compaq/HP recovery partition. The issue, as it turned out, was due to an orphaned registry entry relating to the fact that the initial recovery image was made on an Intel machine (probably at a factory in Texas). On a machine with a non-Intel processor, when Windows is updated to SP2 or SP3, this registry key is activated, and the machine will attempt to start up with intelpmm.sys loading... which causes a BSOD on an AMD machine. How many countless Compaq Presario desktop users came home to this obscure BSOD? We at the shop avoided seeing this problem on a lot of repair jobs, because we would just blow all the partitions, and install fresh with an OEM CD and their key.
Now... the geek in me wants to keep one iteration of an OS going for as long as possible... which I can do with Windows. I am typing this on a copy of windows that was installed... about 5 years ago. I've cloned it onto newer drives, and I've gone through different motherboards without having to reinstall. Why? Because I know enough to be a professional and I make my living on the hardware. I don't think that everyone should have to be a professional to keep their computer running smoothly though. unfortunately, this is not how things are.
So what to do with a machine that crawls? Look first at when it started crawling. If it happened slowly over time, that's hard to do. If you came home one day, booted the box and it crawled from that day forth... you look at the event viewer. You see what your computer did before it started running like crap. Was there a windows update? It is conceivable that there was an automatic update, and it is conceivable that it made a change that made your computer unhappy. I can't tell you how many systems run great as they are updating, then look or sound like crap, because the Windows Update suggested driver for the onboard Intel GPU or C-Media sound (which was actually a Realtek) screwed up an OS rebuild.
There are a bucket full of tools out there.
http://www.majorgeeks.com/
Visit that site. Investigate the tools. Ok, you know about "antivirus" and Spybot. Do you know about Malwarebytes? And how it gets hundreds of current maleware baddies that spybot doesn't? Do you know about Combo Fix, how it will add an easy boot to the recovery console, AND repair some specific Malware infections? There is a long list of tools. And some of them do have an overlap with other tools, in what they find. Others, are Very specific (Smitfraud.C removal tool, for example). How is your AV doing? Are you mistakenly running multiple resident scanners at the same time? DO you have a ton of things running on Startup?
See? Sure, Linux can make things easier in some cases. And yes, the more you know, and the more patience you have (and the more care you exercise) the better your Windows experience can be. But you have to pay attention to your machine. You have to investigate problems. You have to be well armed, or willing to pay a professional to take care of it. Sure. Everyone has the potential to be a great gardener. Most, will hire a professional. Same thing here. I don't care who says it's easy. They forget that they know more than the majority. What is easy for them, is not common knowledge. People still think that their computer needs more "memory", because they can't download any more songs. They don't know that the little windows sticker on the side or bottom of a computer is an
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -D. Adams
What...the...FUCK?
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
Had my laptop grind to a halt - looked at processes and found spoolsv.exe (?spelling) hogging resources - forums explained to me to stop spooler, delete files in Sys32 directory, restart spooler - slowdown vanished... Maybe not same as Timothy describes, but worth knowing about!
You most likely have a component failure. Most often cause by the HDD. I'd test it out with the manufacturers diagnostic software, though those fail to identify a problem about 30% of the time (they indicate no problems when there are problems). I'd test with memtst and see if it results in problems. Remove extra RAM (have just enough to make the computer work (4 gigs on a 32 or 64bit system?).
Software can cause this behavior too. Though it really makes no sense to chase a software problem without first testing the hardware and gaining confidence in it.
Could be you have Norton on there. Could be you have AOL on there. Both of those two products can have problems which result in slowed performance, noticeably slowed. Both McAfee and Norton firewalls can cause all sorts of havoc even tho one day they just worked.
CPU overheating is easy to check and with today's systems it is rare that that will be the contributing factor, especially if nothing happened to trigger it and it was running well before. You'd have noticed a heat problem long ago. Heat issues are generally a result of poorly placed HSF and that would be known soon after you began using the computer on a regular basis.
I've seen a reset of the BIOS to defaults resolve some performance issues, and I've seen the motherboard itself be the cause (CPU, memory, etc replaced and it still goes slow--in fact, I have two motherboards in my shop now that were replaced as a result of that).
Processor, Video card, motherboard, RAM, HDD all can contribute to this (be the cause). Software too, such as malware. Registry errors--extremely common under windows--in the wrong section can cause it. Registry files (hives) being in the location of the HDD where you are developing bad sectors can cause it. Try copying the registry files and rename them. Don't delete the old one. Probably have to do this with your drive as a second drive in another system so you can do the rename properly (copy the files, rename the original hive files to something else, rename the copied files to the new hive files).
Registry fixers don't fix anything. No software today, that I have ever seen, actually fixes a damaged registry. Yeah, some will examine and find entries, etc that are out of line with files, and settings, but that's with an actual working registry. If the registry is damaged no program that I know of can actually fix it.
Scan the computer for malware (yeah, I know you have already) but do it with the HDD in another computer as a second drive.
Check out subinacl from Microsoft. Download that program and the reset.cmd file. Install and run reset. Read about it first before you do so so you understand what's happening.
There are such things as rootkits. The same company that does process explorer also provides a rootkit revealer. But to answer your question just because something is running as a service doesn't mean it will get by the antivirus and anti-malware products you are using.
Spiking at random intervals is normal.
The best friend of an ailing computer is another computer where you can boot the computer with that drive as a second drive. That's a good piece of advice that will save you tons of time in the future.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
"My Windows is NOT slow.
It is special."
Special as in deliberate abuse by a large corporation to increase income?
One simple, quick check is to make sure there's at least 2 Gb of free space on the main C: partition.
I've seen cases where the swap space will get crunched down because there's no room to set it up, and Windows will slow.
I've also seen cases where Internet Explorer will ignore the limits set on cached internet files. Manually doing a clearing of cached files may free up several gigabytes of space if the machine has been used with IE on the internet for a few years.
One much less likely scenario, is if the computer has a dial-up connection. IE seems to 'get stuck' on the connection it initially used, and not change to the network adapter. I was reminded of this issue last night, on a Vista PC.
> Bottnet
You did it again! Lordy, what a moron!
"Few people understand the impact of the common pigeon like your average motorcyclist."
Never hit bird, but rode through a herd of Bees once.
Well... it felt like a herd of 'em, they hurt, even through my leathers.
And that short Hail Storm I rode through up in the Santa Cruz Mtns, OUCH!.
There's a guy around here who rides a Yamaha V-Max, and he cut a deer in half one night that jumped out in front of him up Albion Ridge at about 60 MPH.
He survived fairly unscathed, fixed the bike, and I've seen him riding it since.
I'd say his deer trumps your pigeon for a Motorcyclists Sig, eh?
Keep the rubber side down bro.
If it don't GO... chrome it. ~ Frank Banks
I switched to a Mac, with its flat memory model, just to avoid this kind of issue. There are several things going on with your machine that will cause problems, such as MS's segmented memory model, but the most likely issue you have now is excessive paging between conventional and expanded memory.
Fortunately, the fix is easy: while still in DOS (before starting XP), run MEMMAKER, which is a really slick utility from MS that "automagically" loads DOS and your TSRs into UMB, expanded, and extended memory. You can examine your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files with EDLIN to see what was done. If you take the time to figure out the syntax and fine-tune what's going on, you'll be a Windows guru and the envy of your friends!
I'm sure nearly every one of us has had it happen. All of a sudden your Windows PC slows to a crawl for no apparent reason.
"nearly everyone" on this, the so-called bastion of Linux bigotry?
I once suffered a software bug in a program we were developing at work where instead of exiting, the program would go into the background and hang in a spinning loop (don't ask why and not my code). I had hangs on my desk top from time to time, but I thought it was evolution being stupid (I hate that program). Come to find out that I had a load average over a hundred and had had it for an extended period of time. Nice to know that even an ancient RHEL can withstand that load without breaking down.
Cut & paste from top for posterity:
top - 10:54:37 up 36 days, 2:29, 30 users, load average: 113.60, 113.20, 112.
Tasks: 301 total, 113 running, 188 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 94.0% us, 4.8% sy, 0.2% ni, 1.0% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 1034520k total, 957552k used, 76968k free, 89720k buffers
Swap: 4192924k total, 2248672k used, 1944252k free, 154304k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
16348 steve 15 0 319m 177m 9552 S 58 17.6 3080:25 opera
(The rest of the process table was full of instances of the program under development).
It's kind of fun to know that one process can kill the King of the Desktop, and a hundred+ processes cannot kill the not-ready-for-the-Desktop.
Watch more TV. I did and I found FinallyFast.com.
My computer used to be slow. But now it's finally fast! FinallyFast.com!
(Please don't.)
http://info.drweb.com/show/3342/en
Every time this happens to me I run Stopzilla and Webroot and I always find some malware that got thru. I have found a spyware that norton did not see but spybot found. Once spybot removed a component, norton could see the rest. I depend on Stopzilla and it really cleans up
wake up and hold your nose
> Could this be a very clever virus that doesn't run as a process?
Possibly. More and more viruses run in a DLL that is attached to a necessary Windows process (like winlogon.exe)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
How about my old Inspiron 8000 notebook that started to be slow starting a few months ago, running Xorg at 20-40-50% of CPU while Firefox runs up the rest, 40-50-85%? Its running the latest Ubuntu Intrepid/8.10 updates. I tried switching between the proprietary nVidia driver by activating it with System:: Administration:: Hardware Drivers and the one automatically installed by (dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg) , which worked a few times to return its speed over the past few months, but no more. The GPU is a GeForce2 Go, which got upgraded in nvidia-glx-96, but not since then (it's up to nvidia-glx-180 now).
How do I nail this thing down, and fix it? Firefox shouldn't slow to 30-60 seconds to switch between tabs, submit this post, etc.
--
make install -not war
Open the case cover and use compressed air (while the system is off and unplugged) to clean it out internally. Then turn it on and examine all of the system's cooling fans to make sure they operate. If a system is overheating, it will slow down (if it doesn't completely fail) until it cools down at which point it will speed up again. As these physical check are quite easy to do, why not start with them?
- James
I still have a PC that has a turbo button.
And Yeah, it changes the clock from 4.77Mhz to 10MHz.
It even has a 10MHz coprocessor, lol, with a whopping 4MB of memory.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Right, because the people who run botnets dedicate them to mod you down on Slashdot. Riiight.
Sounds like the tubes are clogged. It happens to my internets all the time.
Storage is cheap, and software doesn't take a lot of space.
For my father, here is what I did:
Pair of 250 gig hard drives (my old ones). One formatted 50 gigs Windows, and 50 gigs just as a second NTFS partition. The other formatted as Linux.
Boot the Linux drive, then ntfsclone the Windows drive (be sure to use the -s option) -- even just with lzop compression, chances are you can fit quite a lot of images. Such as: Just after installing each item.
Standard backup solutions like rdiffbackup can be used for the other drive.
Then, when something goes wrong, boot Linux, use ClamAV to scan the data drive, and re-image the software drive. Problem solved.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Open the process list and Google in a window, side by side. One by one identify each process and see what Google throws up. If nothing, then do a registry clean. If you are still slow then you start to suspect hardware.
My wife has a Sempron laptop and she was complaining about it becoming extremely slow after 1 hour of use.
I've investigated and it turns out that the system ends up throttling down to 800Mhz (from 2.0Ghz) due to overheat. So now she turns the AC on when she's using the computer. Maybe I should get her a netbook to save on my electric bills?
1) Download Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware, and run it. It was the only thing that found a virus on my computer recently, out of six packages (including two commercial ones).
2) Download HijackThis, if that doesn't work. Be careful with this package, though! You can do some serious damage to your computer by blindly following its advice. Read the forums.
3) How full is your hard drive? If the C: drive is full enough, fragmentation can dramatically mess up performance in a very short time. Clean and defrag. I personally find it worthwhile to use SmartDefrag, a much more powerful defragger than the one that's built into Windows.
4) Read your logs. Yes, Windows actually logs stuff! Go to "Control Panel-->Administrative Tools-->Computer Management" and then dig through "System Tools-->Event Viewer" TONS of useful information about what's not healthy on your system, including complete boot logs.
Good luck.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
How to Speed Up Your PC I posted this a few days ago about how to speed up a PC. Many times, spyware and malware are to blame but there could also be registry errors as well. Its a start.
Data Rocket Jon Phillips
Did anyone notice this when clicking on the image link?
Secure Connection Failed
blogs.technet.com uses an invalid security certificate.
The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is unknown.
(Error code: sec_error_unknown_issuer)
Get up!
Lol. But that's the fun isn't it, if he puts it all back together he passes for taking it apart. ;-)
Quack, quack.
Quick thoughts:
Yep, silly six times of errors and you get PIO. I've had to manually reset quite a few Windows IDE channels. Watch for this one especially if you are cloning HDDs without defragementing regularly.
CA's AV Suite beats up on Vista (at least one the one Vista PC I have), making what is a responsive system with AVG or SAV painfully slow, especially for UAC events. There may be other AVs with this problem.
I'm surprised that none of the posts have mentioned Bart's PE, http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ Easy enough to add AV to it an do a full scan with the OS offline, and no way to infect anything as you are running from a CD. That is about the easiest way to determine if it is software, as there will be items noted by the AV program, something odd that will stand out when compared to a happy system.
"What luck for the rulers that men do not think." - Adolph Hitler
if so, replace the batteries. Windows will spend ungodly amounts of cpu time polling the mouse if the battery is low.
3C
What's there to diagnose, it's infected with Windows. It's like telling someone how to diagnose a suddenly sore throat of someone with a cold...
I've had this problem when a USB device was being unresponsive. It would cause the system to slow, and it would hang if I tried to open My Computer with the device connected (that annoying flashlight animation), but disconnecting the device solved the problem. So after an annoying live chat session with hp, they helped me fix it. Try unplugging your USB devices and see if it still slows to a crawl.
Why you don't use a normal vacuum...
http://www.industrialairsolutions.com/industrial-vacuums/ESD-Vacuums/ESD-vacuum-systems.htm
Standard vac builds up a lot of static, and these are designed to
eliminate that.
Likewise with an air compressor, they can spray water droplets
into the PC unless it has a air dryer device installed.
Also using high speed air across fans making them spin much faster
than normal can cause DC perm magnet fans to induce voltage back
into the motherboard like a generator, so you might jam them still
with something non-magnetic while putting a "wicked" amount of
air across them.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
I thought the whole point of aircan instead of vacuum is to avoid static electricity zapping the computer?
If you run Process Explorer and see a lot of interrupts occurring, it's almost always a processor or motherboard. Boot from a BART PE disc and see if it is slow there. If so, it's hardware. Also I've seen bad CD-ROM drives on several occasions cause this. Or if you suspect malware. Take it to GeekSquad ask them to boot your computer up in PE mode from an MRI disc and run a READ-ONLY FACE Scan in targeted mode. That will scan with 8 different AS/AV products. Usually they won't charge you for this because it's a scan and not a removal.
Also using high speed air across fans making them spin much faster
than normal can cause DC perm magnet fans to induce voltage back
into the motherboard like a generator,
This may be true, but I've been doing it for 20 years without incident.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
This might be important in drier climes. I've been doing this for a long time in the pacific northwest. I started after seeing the DEC engineer doing it on our VAXes a long time ago (back when an 11/780 was cool)
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
First: Get this. If you got a rootkit, this should find it. unless it's something zero day. If it finds stuff, then reboot back into windows and run something like Malwarebytes Anti Malware or Spybot Search and Destroy for a few days (a week or two with Spybot. They only update on Wednesdays) to get it completely cleaned out. Windows Defender also works good here and adds realtime scannning to the mix.
Second: Like someone above posted, Check for Drives Running PIO in Device Manager. If you find any, run the resetDMA Script someone above posted. ALso Check your BIOS for changed settings. Dying CMOS batteries can cause a lot of havok with DMA settings depening on the BIOS defaults.
Third: Test Hardware. Contrary to Popular belief here, Windows NT Kernel Failures, *Especially Blue Screens* Are usually caused by either a Hardware failure or a Driver failure. If it's been running great and then BAM, check hardware first. The Ultimate Boot CD has all the tests you need. Test for RAM errors and test your Hard drive using the Drive Specific diagnostic program.
Forth: if all else fails after this, backtrack. If you installed something recently, and the machine started acting weird afterwards. uninstall it and see what happens. System restore (if it actually works) also comes in handy.
Finally, a Tip. Stay The Hell away from "optimizing" software. Just about every Registry optimizer I've ever seen screws up more then it's worth. Speed boosters tend to slow things down in the long run or lock windows, and any disk optimizer basically does nothing different than defrag C:. Even Microsoft's Registry and cleaning offerings on their onecare site has screwed me over in some cases, and if they can't optimize their own OS... Just say no to them.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
My wife's computer was running slow like this - I put it down to firefox 3 being crap. However, what we found is if you keep the task manager open (minimised) then the sluggishness goes away. Even ff3 works as advertised (still takes up many hundreds of megs though). Virus/trojan/bot?
I've been experiencing a periodic but frequent cpu/disk usage spike for about 3 weeks now on my xp laptop. I can't listen to music or type effectively because the system hangs for several seconds at a time.
I've searched the interwebs for solutions, run numerous virus/malware apps, defragged and run the pc in non-networked safe mode to no avail.
Today I was checking my blog feeds and ran across this article, read the replies, ran the DMA VBS script mentioned above and Lord Have Mercy, my laptop is back!
This friggin rocks!!! Happy days are here again. la la la la la. Yippy.
Had you tried turning it off and turning it back on?
No.
The Intel Pentium Pro solved that in 1995, it's called PAE. Microsoft have just been a bit slow to support it in their products aimed at the home market but their server products do. Everyone else has got around to supporting it some time over the last twelve years.
Switching to 64bit if you can does solve it, but blaming it on the architecture when you have a recent computer is completely missing the mark.
You could install 32 bit Linux, opensolaris, *BSD, BeOS, Plan9, MS Server 2003 etc etc on the exact same 32 bit hardware and it would work in most cases - because all of the above support CPUs made after 1995 properly.
...installed Windows Vista?
The future ain't what it used to be.
Too lazy to search google and ask on a forum related to sorting out pc troubles?
I'm not as worthy a geek as many you'l meet on SDOT but....try checking the main processor's heatsink and fan for dust build up or bad fan bearings. The cpu may be throttling back when things get warm. While you are in there, visually inspect any electrolytic capacitors for signs of swelling or leaks. I have an extra mobo like that, still works, but throttles down & up & down again due to bad caps.
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
Did you perhaps just install or enable MS Windows Search (or whatever it is called)? Or did you move gigs worth of documents around? Moving about 10-20Gb files (including about 3Gb of emails) around on high end Lenovo with Vista resulted in unbearable slowness and I think the culprit was the indexing service. As at that time the index was reported not fully done.
I would grab autoruns from wininternals. It shows all the processes that start up. Things like java, quicktime, adobe reader, and others add things to starts up that just use memory and do nothing.
Don't know if this is of any use, but about one month ago a friend asked me to check his Windows computer because it 'suddenly' became very slow and stopped at random times.
What happened is that after trying to save a file in OpenOffice or opening Windows Explorer, the programs just freezed.
I spent two hours looking at different things without real success, however after that somehow we needed to copy a file (we were also installing a camera... what a pain in Windows Vista!!) and that is when I realized an SD card was inserted into the reader.
As soon as we removed the SD card, the problem completely dissapeared. After thinking a bit he told me that it made sense, because the computer started failing more or less at the time he inserted the card (to copy some photos). AND, that his card was old.
It may be worth checking what you have connected in the computer!!
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
In spite of all the things that point to your hard drive, before you get all involved with testing it, take a minute to check something simple. I ran into this trouble with a customer of mine. His computer was only 2 years old. He never had a problem with it being slow. Then, within a few days, the thing was crawling. Fez posted about the speed of the hard drive being slowed to PI0, due to errors. Very TRUE, BUT, what if the computer was built WRONG to begin with. It was built with a CD burner attached to the second connector on the PRI IDE controller. The problem would never show up UNTIL the owner experienced FAILURES trying to burn a CD. WIN XP looks at errors on the PRI IDE controller as coming from the Hard drive, therefore, it slowed down the hard drive to PI0, even though all the errors came from the CD burner. All CD-Roms or other ATAPI units should always be installed on the Sec IDE controller. Just a simple thing to check, BEFORE getting real complicated.
Seriously. If it's been that long and you've had the same hard drive it came with, it's likely time for a swap out. You can get a brand new super fast SATA drive or better yet, maybe even create a RAID subsystem. If you don't care about redundancy, you can't beat the speed of RAID 0. I used to use it on a development workstation and it just made the entire system snappier.
That said, it's probably a physical IO issue, such as the hard drive. I just had a laptop that slowed to a crawl and replacing the hard drive seemed to fix it quite nicely.
One other thought -- I once had to work on a computer that, no matter what I did to it continued to run slowly. We replaced RAM, hard drives, countless benchmarks and reinstalls later the problem persisted. In the end it turned out to be a faulty cable. So yeah, it can be that simple.
Yeah.. sure it doesn't.
Today I got home from work and all the programs I had running... were gone. Everything from Firefox with 400 tabs to Pidgin, gone.
Turns out a perl script had encountered a situation it shouldn't. The result was it went looping as fast as it could thus:
while ($var > $array[$i]) {
$i++;
}
Linux doesn't do anything like this indeed. heh.
Scenario 2: Firefox ran out of room where I was storing its profile. It got into some loop which used up _ALL_ of my system memory. My system went from fairly responsive to SLUGGISH outstandingly quickly. Turns out when swap is full and you have 50MB free physical memory, the system doesn't work.
I tried killing it.. but eventually even my xterm froze and I couldn't type the commands. I couldn't move the mouse -- the cursor stayed where it was frozen. I couldn't do anything. I hit ctrl-alt-F1 to get to a TTy. 5 or 10 minutes later, I got there. "root". The password dialog never showed up. Tried to ssh in, no success.. no reply to _pings_ from another host. Half an hour later.. power it off.. a normal user's app (firefox) managed to eat all system memory and lock my system.
Linux doesn't suddenly "slow", indeed. It completely locks up with a moment's notice.
Lets try a last one. An app, lets say Firefox, uses a lot of system memory. When swapping starts, the mouse starts jumping. it'll lag in one place for a couple seconds, jump a few inches, wait, jump, wait, ... it makes it impossible to get to an xterm to kill the offending app. It's just a prequel to the above, so you'd better hope you get to a tty and log in before you run out of swap.
Linux doesn't lag, indeed.
I run Gentoo, have for perhaps 4 years. The only real modifications I've made from defaults are decreasing swappiness (to 10, I believe), and _very_ recently I added a user limit on maximum memory one process can use (which is probably the only reason I could do _anything_ on my computer after the perl incident). I've tried nice'ing programs, _not_ nice'ing programs, ionice, just recently some ulimits to keep my system from locking, ... nothing has even made an improvement in the lag.
Windows, slow... my ass. Linux is MUCH WORSE in my half decade or so of experience. Windows isn't as bad, FreeBSD has no problem whatsoever.. but Linux.. I'm thoroughly shocked and disgusted. I can't use Windows because of the lack of shell, and I don't use FreeBSD because of video drivers and some applications having incompatibilities. Portage, too, is a blessing compared to everything else.. but the kernel..
If anyone has some suggestions, PLEASE suggest. I've tried all I can find, which is next to nothing. I run Firefox 32-bit to prevent it from using as much memory (and I STILL have seen it at 2.5GB, according to top -- something I just can't fathom), would do the same with the base system, but Gentoo doesn't appear to support 32-bit userland in 64-bit Linux.
-Anonymous
Doesn't Windows version n-1 get its slow-down bit set one financial quarter before the box product release of Windows version n?
I work as an anti-virus specialist who deals with scenario's such as yours on a day to day basis. If you have determined that in fact your hard drive is in working order then you most likely have a rootkit.
Modern rootkit infections are able to hide their functions completely and many don't exist as processes at all. This is usually accomplished through threadjacking or driver injection into the hard drive which filters all requests for certain file or process names. An example of this sort of rootkit is TDSSserv.sys (AKA TiDServ) or Seneka.sys. (Both are from the same code base)
I'd recommend you run Rootkit Revealer before anything else, just make sure your not doing anything during the scan, it scans for changes between an API scan and a low level scan so any activity could be detected as "suspicious". If you have a newer, more complex infection it should report "Unable to mount Drive C:\". Try using GMER or ICEsword to remove the infections or attempt to remove them manually.
Good luck.
I mean, for example, the HDD overheats and doesn't do more than throw fits. Err, faults. It happened to me, circa 2001, after stuffing increasingly hot components in a box that was obviously designed for old cool stuff.
We're not talking something that happens regularly. And just an old-and-upgraded home box, not some enterprise system with redundant hard drives mirrored.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Lastly, when you fix the issue you should remove your wife from the administrators group and just make her a user or power user. When she needs to install software or whatever just have her log in as admin.
Good point, make sure ALL your peripherals are working properly before taking the system apart.
Though be careful how you bring up RMA, or upgrade.
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
It could be a rootkit, use Avast anti-virus program and do a boot time scan. /3GB parameter
/3GB parameter enables 4-gigabyte (GB) random access memory (RAM) Tuning, a feature that enlarges the user-mode virtual address space to 3 GB and restricts the kernel-mode components to the remaining 1 GB.
/PAE parameter
/PAE parameter enables Physical Address Extension (PAE). This parameter directs the system to load the PAE version of the Windows kernel. PAE is an addressing strategy that uses a page-translation hierarchy to enable systems that have 32-bit addressing to address more than 4 GB of physical memory.
You should also use CCleaner to clean out all the trash in your hard disk.
Another thing you can check is your boot up parameter
The
On 32-bit versions of Windows, the
The
The
This reminds me of one program I was using that abused mouse hooks to see if the user was idle. It would cause certain programs to spike when moving the mouse (probably processes with a lot of handles receiving mouse messages). Wasn't all that noticeable until the framerate dropped substantially in games, where one uses the mouse a lot. Once I figured it out, I stopped using that program needless to say.
There're hundreds of reasons why a PC can get slower; prevention is better than cure. Make your PC kind of a fortress with steep, slippery walls on the boundary. So here it foes - 1. Get Windows Steady State; RTFM & set it up well. 2. Get a good firewall, keep only one or two gates open for outsiders 3. Get a light-weight sentry like Win Patrol that warns you of any dubious change of system files. 4. Keep a strong anti-virus; set it to do a full scan at low priority, behind the scene once every week. The first one, windows steady state, you can set it such that even if your kid goes to a bad site & brings home a few nasty spyware, your PC gets back to its original state as soon as he logs off. Trust me, this method is better than loading you PC with some bulky security suites.
Am I the only one that thinks that slow downs are built in to Windows? Run it for a while then get strange, unexplained, noticeable slow down. Millions of customers say, "When was the last time I formatted my HD and reinstalled Windows? Boy. That was a lot of work (or cost a lot of money). Maybe I should get the new version (98, ME, XP, Vista, 7, etc...) If I'm going to do that, I should just get a new system." With a sales strategy built into the software, everyone who stands to make a profit wins...unless customers get stubborn and find the problem. I have not read all the comments, but past the basic diagnostics, I look for something that's caught in a loop, usually trying to install. msconfig can sometimes reveal it. HP software? Uninstall and reinstall. Or just uninstall and throw the printer off a bridge.
-J
I scanned through the comments and didn't see this mentioned yet, so...
Check if the processor speed is being throttled. I once saw a laptop that seems to have the symptoms you described - everything going slow, processes taking lots of CPU time.
It turned out something was wrong with the power management and it was keeping the CPU at the minimum speed permanently. Setting the power profile to "Always On" fixed it for a while, but then it started again, so I disabled the processor power management features in the BIOS.
The post didn't mention if this is a laptop or desktop, but even modern desktop CPUs have lots of power states. Worth a look.
If windows is still at a crawl after running antivirus, spyware scanners and defragging tools, then check inside the case to see if there is dust clogging your CPU fan and any other moving parts. A can of air duster can blast it out of there. If you are cheap like me, then a soft painting brush and a vacuum is all you need.
I had this problem with a new (3 months) old Dell box. It came with a USB keyboard/mouse, and a nice 21 inch LCD monitor which had a USB hub (so that you could plug the keyboard and mouse into the monitor, instead of the box) It turned out, the hub in the monitor was really poor, and started generating interupts when there was no keyboard or mouse activity. plugging the keyboard/mouse into the box solved the problem until a new monitor arrived.
For the actual transfer, yes, you have to poll and suck in the bytes one by one. But AFAIK you don't have to wait in a loop for the seek to finish. Unless we're talking about old MFM drives on the XT. As I was saying, the PC architecture does have interrupts for just about everything. So you just start another process and wait for the interrupt.
Heck, even without interrupts, typical total HDD latency is between 6ms (Velociraptor) and 20+ms. You can just poll once every millisecond (or how often your scheduler interrupt comes) and do something else until it finishes.
Copying a file between two partitions is a scenario that's 90% dominated by waiting for the head to be in the right position, and for the right sector to come under it. Make that maybe 99% if the partitions are on the same physical HDD. Any competently written system, even in PIO mode has 90% of the CPU time there free for other processes.
At least NT obviously didn't have. As I was saying, with the drivers configured wrong in PIO mode, it just froze solid for a second when minimizing a window. I can't imagine any scenario where that's normal.
And the fact that Windows simply gets stuffed there, tells me that something's rotten in the kingdom of Redmond. Maybe it's not Windows itself but the IDE drivers or whatever. But something is thoroughly suboptimal in its disk IO IMHO.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Take a look at this tutorial: http://www.lazybit.com/index.php/2008/02/22/fix_blue_screen_death_strategy_part_two?blog=2
Although it originally deals with blue screens, you can use the same strategy to narrow the problem down to a particular process or driver.
Other posters' suggestions about using Process Monitor and Process Explorer are good ones, but they fail to take into account that these tools only show processes running in user mode. If the slow-down is caused by a driver that runs in kernel mode, then you will have to turn off some drivers, reboot - and see the effect.
Note that even if a driver is not loaded automatically when the system boots, it can be loaded later by a user mode process.
The saddest poem
For the last 8 years I've pretty much only used Linux, and my experience has been that whenever the machine suddenly becomes consistently slow (not just a few seconds because of updatedb), it's a DNS issue. Maybe you have a primary DNS that times out and then fails over to a second one or so.
That's my rule of thumb, and it has served me well.
Probably the same on Windows.
Bart
Windows search indexer turned out to be the cause of horrendous performance on my system. You can turn it off by running Services (find it at Start>Programs>Admiistrative Tools>Services). Right-click Windows Search service and select Properties. In Startup type, choose Manual. This made a huge difference in my case.
Whenever I see a marked slowdown on my PC, I remove the casing and give the thing a damn good clean. You'd be amazed how even in a clean room with air conditioning, the amount of gunk and dust builds up on the fans, even after 6 months. And that means all of them, CPU fan, graphics card fan, and even open up the PSU and clean those fans too.
Fans running even slightly slower will cause all your components (PSU, Hard Disks, CPU) to run hotter, and that leads to random slowdowns, data corruption, even bluescreens at times.
Boot on a Knoppix or Ubuntu and see if the
speed picks up.
If not you most likely have a hardware issue.
Typical problems would be dust in the cooler
and/or a failing fan.
Open the box and see if there is dust or the fan runs slow.
VB WinsockFix seemed to correct the slowing for me. It is for winsock and TCP restoration of registry keys that have become corrupt upon removing host programs that modified them. It is freeware.
My windows system slows down (and has other funny behaviour) about once a year. The solution I have found is reload windows with a fresh installation (not repaired). Works every time so in my view is not a hardware problem.
Call it a hunch.
Network Location Awareness (NLA) can cause such problems.
Disable and stop the service in services.msc
It's not needed unless you are changing networks a lot, and even then it can get by without it.
It took me a while to figure out when I was getting exactly the same results. Typically the s
I know that this may not be the solution you are looking for since it requires reinstalling windows but if you setup your machine as following it should always run as in day one.
- Create 3 partitions and install on the first one only windows and the required drivers.
- On the second one install all the heavy applications that you use in order to keep the filesystem from which the windows boot-up light.
- Use TweakUI to move the "My Documents" folder and the "Desktop Folder" if you want too on a folder you created for that purpose at the third partition.
- If you are using Firefox, go into the folder "%USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox" and you will find a file called "profiles.ini"
Edit it and change "IsRelative=1" to "IsRelative=0" and also the line that should look like this: "Path=Profiles/ees1j6vw.default" change it to something like this: "Path=E:/Firefox/Profiles/ees1j6vw.default"
Now, copy the folder "ees1j6vw.default" (or how else it's named to "E:\Firefox\Profiles" that you should create on the "E:" drive
That way you move the profile of firefox that contains everything from bookmarks to add-ons on the third partition.
- After all that, use "deep freeze" to freeze the first two partitions.
That way, you will have two partitions containing windows and your applications protected from viruses/trojans etc (at least from most of them, I don't know any that can infect a frozen partition and remain there after reboot).
You will also experience every day the same performance as long as we are not talking about a hardware problem.
Your data should ALWAYS go on the third partition otherwise they will be lost on reboot (along with any virus/trojan known or unknown).
When you want to install a new application, do it on the second partition after you scan it with an antivirus first and after you temporarily unfreeze the partitions.
I have set-up my laptop that way about two years ago and it's performance has not been degraded at all.
I hope it was helpful
Sophoclis
But, in general, if McAffee is installed on the system, Scan32.exe is a likely culprit. The network administrator can remotely launch it if they suspect a nasty virus outbreak on the network. You can safely kill it if you're sure that you don't have a virus.
If you ever see iexplore.exe or firefox.exe being the culprit, look for a page/tab with lots of animations. It could be a badly-written flash animation. (Remember some of the Dice ads that Slashdot used to serve a year ago? They would always max out a core, even if the page was in the background!) Consider using Google Chrome, which runs different pages in different processes as a way to mitigate this issue.
No, I will not work for your startup
My wife's system slowed way down for no apparent reason and ultimately stopped altogether. It wasn't a virus, worm, spyware or rootkit. It wasn't the hard drive.
We got in a tech who checked out the CPU -- no problem there. Then he checked out the motherboard. Dead as a doornail. We upgraded both for a fraction of what a whole new system would cost, and now she's back in business.
Now if only I could persuade her not to run the AOL client... there are times when "what you like and are used to" is not a sufficient excuse to keep using an utter piece of shit.
I piss off bigots.
Actually /PAE does nothing in Windows XP, primarily to avoid issues with drivers that don't support PAE, as you need special PAE-aware drivers for all devices in your system.
I have always wondered if the server versions of Windows do not have this I/O limitation but I have been too lazy to do a proper comparison.
unless the submitter has two identical machines. Reason being, if the hard disc is swapped into another system there's a fair chance the wrong chipset driver will be provided and the compisite machine will bluescreen.
Even worse would be if the machine starts correctly and then installs its own chipset driver causing bluescreens when the hard disc is swapped back.
My first port of call, before the memory diagnostic and before running SMART tests would be the event log. It's neglected far too much for my liking.
I'd follow that with perfmon, and then offline AV scanners / liveCDs. Then I'd start thinking about burn-in testing and swapping out hardware.
In some fantasy/virtual reality utopia where we are afforded the time to "scratch" our technical itches by delving deep enough to find the actual cause of the problem, there are lots of options for where to look next, and most of them are already in this thread.
But in the real world where our time comes at an hourly rate, your best course of option is simple: spend the 3 hours it takes to re-install your OS, patch it up, re-install your apps, patch them up, configure your apps, restore your data, and away you go.
Because that's the real world.
Yes, you've caught something (which you may or may not find if you go looking), or something else has gone wrong/become corrupt. Just re-install and move on.
And there are two bonuses:
1. your system will magically improve in performance to the level it was at the first day you turned it on, before you started down the inevitable path of bloat/crapware and steadily degrading performance.
2. you'll learn a few things along the way/make better choices about what to install and what not to install, ending up with a leaner, faster, more reliable system.
The best tool is CC Cleaner by Piriform and it is free. Just make sure you do not install the add in's on install. It is spyware adware free I can assure you. Run it and
1, Under cleaner run cleaner. That will clear up a bunch of files.
2, The run registry and fix all the errors, you might want to do this twice.
3, Under Tools, click start up and delete all unnecessary start up items.
This will pretty much sort everything out.
Tweak and take an image. As soon as it starts to suck, and assuming you take backups you know about, resume the image and restore. NEXT!
Athy, athier, athiest.
On an XP box, the most common problem I see is deferred procedure calls sucking up cycles. This is often when you see in Task Manager that the cycles for the processes don't add up to that 100% figure you're seeing in its status bar.
Take a look at this:
http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml
Check what speed the processor is running at. If the CPU fan has failed then SpeedStep or something similar could be throttling down the speed of the processor to prevent it overheating.
format
-pERKDIZZLE
usually i install wubi and with it you get an os without spyware also you escape the win32 virus named microsoft (called by noname antivirus win32.WindoZe)
http://wubi-installer.org/
Other alternatives
http://goodbye-microsoft.com/
or
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/
developer http://flamerobin.org
Whenever I've had this as an issue (and enough friends have complained that their machine "got slow") I've found it's almost easier to just wipe the machine and start again...
Thank you for the trip down memory lane! Man I miss the old 4.77 -> 8 turbo button. . . The warm orange-yellow glow telling me that I was going BLAZING fast. And for you whipper-snappers out there, it WAS important. Lots of games depended on the clock running at 4.77 to run properly. . . Ok maybe not "important," but I liked playing those games.
My work develoment PC was slowing to a crawl. Diagnosed the problem as the swap file. Windoze's handling of the swap file seems pants!! For a start it seemed to want to set the minimum size to 2Gb no matter what I told it. Also, can you believe it, it allows the swap file to get fragmented. The 2Gb file was in hundreds of fragments! So I got rid of the swap file, added an extra gig of RAM and now my system runs as sweet as a nut. Now, if only I could get rid of that registry...
It's not a hdd problem, it's not a this or that problem. It's a "Thats life" problem.
It happens. All you can do is backup your data and F-O-R-M-A-T. It takes an hour out of your day, providing you backed up your drivers to an auto-loading exe.
Just format, and save yourself the future hassle.
Also has the best sales video ever. YouTube, look it up ;)
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Always start with the bog standard task manager, and switch on cpu usage, threads, mem usage and gdi objects to start with.
and push the ram stick back in that accidently got dislodged when you kicked it last time
Since when wiping out the OS became a solution to a problem?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Bad IDE cable can also cause this.
No sig today...
I sit on about 1200 here and after over two decades there's a list... Of course just having a ghost at the ready is optimum (we use Acronis....) But the usual suspects here are, in order: Network liability during a network slowdown. (Having too many open shares). Defrag Bad Blocks (Replace HDD) MFT at 99% (or too many MFT Fragments) Too many backround apps or loaded services (don't uncheck them in msconfig, disabled them in services or they're still loaded) Bad MBoard Malware Trjans and viruses (Very rare, this is a Gov Dept) Good luck !
End of Line.
I've seen similar behavior on my mother's box (Athlon XP 1600+, 768 MB of memory, Windows XP SP2).
The system was dog slow. Each click and every action took up to a minute to complete. No obvious resource hog could be observed under Task Manager.
Eventually, I've upgraded the IBM Proventia Desktop app (came with a VPN package) to a newer version, and the system literally recovered from a slow stutter to a normal (usable) pace.
:(){
Download CCleaner and Defraggler from http://www.piriform.com/.
Run CCleaner first on the system and the registry. Then use Defraggler to defrag the HD.
Believe or not I had these two programs fix NUMEROUS problems under Windows. Everything from IE acting wacky to slow performance.
Both products are free and extremely well designed. Consider donating to the authors.
first thing to do is boot a live linux CD. run a bunch of performance benchmarks. Does it seem slow? If it is still slow, or you have obvious messages in logs (timeouts, retries, etc...) then it is hardware. If it is lively, then it's sw. others have posted about what to do in each case.
According with priority policies of the Operating Systems you should not only check for hard drive problems, but for every I/O hardware that could be failing or any process that wants to use an I/O device.
I tell you why:
Windows has the policy that the most important things are I/O, after that, the kernel, and then, if there is idle processor time (or an idle processor in a SMP architecture) will be dispatched another process. This is a BAAAAAD (in my opinion) dispatching policy, because I/O processes usually almost take control of the computer while the processor is doing nothing but busy waiting and could be processing another things.
Instead, Linux kernel does not do that, and also you can change the process priorities as easy as pressing "r", writing the process PID and the new nice number when you are executing top.
Spinrite surpasses the manufacturer diagnostic tools. It has saved my drives AND data more than any of the others combined.
The downside - it doesn't work with any RAID nor is there a trivial USB connection capability. RAID is out completely for drives during tests since it needs direct access to the hardware. I've heard that virtual machines shouldn't be used either. OTOH, it doesn't come with USB drivers, so the disks need to be directly attached to a standalone PC with the correct drive connector (IDE, SATA, SAS, whatever) that works with FreeDOS.
As to fixing a slowing windows ...
1) check DMA mode
2) Backup your data and reinstall
3) Move to a Virtual Machine and then to ever faster CPUs
4) If you suspect malware or a virus, reload the OS from scratch - the risk isn't worth it.
Didn't see this one either, check your CPU temp in the BIOS and do some research to see if it's in range. Just had this come up with an old HP. I had to pull the heat sink off and smear the grease back into the center. Cooled it by 80 degrees and fixed the slow down problem. Also, clean your fans of dust to keep cooling efficient.
Bill Gates not only frauded
American Software Engineers,
He sold out America, for less
than pennies of a dollar.
If you suspect a trojan/virus or
are experiencing another type
of automatic startup problem,
try this:
While Microsoft's Windows
is booting, hold the [shift] key
while pressing [enter] key
after your password ( and
before you see your desktop or
"loading personal settings")
and keep down the [shift] key
while your desktop is loading.
---
markawashburn@bigfoot.com, 20 hours per week,
healing from carpel tunnel restriction,
( and noticably too much involuntary
involvement with Bill Gate's FRAUD with DOS, anti-virus security and Windows 95. ( 98 and XP also use several features I started testing in 1991 within my DOS and Windows 3.1 environments.
The bastards have even slandered my Office Automation and Document Managament Software Engineer job interviews. ))
McAfee On-Access Scan is brutal on performance.
there is actually a very high probability of a root kit. these are very capable of hiding running processes from you being able to see them.
Whenever I work on a computer, and EVERYONE has the slowing down problem. It sounds like you have a program bogging it down. 1. Run msconfig, and go to startup, and uncheck anything that you don't need. 2. Right click My Computer, and go to properties. Go to the advanced tab, and it will be the second button in the middle (visual effects, if I remember right). There will be a few options checked there. Uncheck the ones that animate, fade, and slide, then click apply and okay. 3. Max your virtual memory / paging file. With some computers, that helps out a HUGE amount. For a 32 bit processor, the max is 4095 mb. I don't know what it is for a 64 bit OS (since you have 4 gigs of ram) but I would try to go the highest you could. Hope you get this over the 600+ relpies, and I hope it helps! =)
Damn I'm good!
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
After "virus", which he said was not there, you should perform the following check:
if ("X was installed between the time it was fast and the time it slowed down") uninstall X
else
start checking hardware.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I am seen mostly good advice.
However, no one asked a very important question. Are you running a legit copy of XP with all the updates installed?
Everyone seems to assume this is the case.
I know back in the day, I ran a pirated version of XP(Windows ME came pre-installed, whats a guy to do!), and you can't get all the security updates on it.
If this is the case you probably have about half a million viruses, malware, adware, Trojans, worms, keyloggers, and are apart of at least 6 botnets, and this only after being attached to the internet for about 30min.
You can run various antivirus, anti-malware, anti-adware, etc... programs, but typically one will miss some while another will miss others, and they all detect each other as viruses.
Anyone of these missed baddies may be causing problems, and not all show up in your process list (or at least not in a easily identifiable way). Applying the various software guards, and hard and software firewalls will help, but I know my old machine would eventually chug to a halt, at which time I would do a clean install, usually a couple times a year.
Eventually I got tired of all this and installed Linux. However while I no longer had any more problems of that sort, getting any, even older games to run, was a major chore (if you could get it to run at all). I have since got a more current machine and run a legit copy of Vista on it. So long as you are not a dope and install some sketchy internet file, there is no problems.
Also even with a legit copy of XP, you will eventually, have enough dust bunnies in your OS closet, from stupid programs in your start up, in your task menu, and silly stuff clogging up this and that... I am sure you can use various tools like CCleaner etc.. to try and clean house, and while they may help, it would probably take just about as long to do a fresh clean install, and update your settings again. I know that was one benefit to running pirate XP, I could install the thing blind, and it forced me to keep good backup practices... :)
My eyes!!!! MY EYEEESSS!!!!
Be sure to check for stranded mapped network drives that no longer can reach the destination URL. This causes a slow down everytime you open the file explorer. The more stranded, the longer the delay.
I have some theories I made up while taking a shit:
1) The registry grows past some as-yet unknown size barrier, possibly a cache size, and this is causing lots of long fetching delays which become noticble due to the massive no. of registry accesses that occur. Alternatively/additionally, installed applications running in TSR/daemon/service mode are locking important parts of the registry which is causing long delays and time-outs when the system/other apps are trying to access those sections.
This is my theory for the slowdowns where the symptoms are Windows pausing randomly, i.e. no apparent HD or network or CPU activity.
I postulated it from my attempts to figure out the User Hive Unloading problem that Windows has.
2) Important system files are in the wrong place on the disk.
When you install Windows, everything usually ends up on the faster parts of the disk. As things are installed, hotfixes applied and espescially service packs installed, these system files end up in slower areas of the disk, and also probably fragmented.
To my knowledge, no defragger since older versions of Norton SpeedDisk can relocate files for speed (DisKeeper claims to, but from what I've seen it is a token effort at best, on par with the one in Win95), they just literally defrag the files, leaving the files themselves scattered all over the disk or compacting the defragmented files into a big lump.
3) Badgers
It's the amount of time you would have to spend as compared to a total reinstall of the OS, applications, config etc. else keep two Windows partitions and restore from the clean one at boot, else use a Linux distro ..
davecb5620@gmail.com
I know that it wasn't stated specifically that you had any updates recently, but my g/f's laptop recently took a similarly stinky dump. I have changed HDDs and totally wiped the o/s (low level format of the drive... can't beat THAT). After fully re-installing, it was still slow. I have narrowed the problem down to a driver issue, it would appear that two of the drivers are arguing over resources and that is causing the computer to spaz out every so often (say every one or two seconds?) . I have yet to locate the angry drivers because windows does not report any conflicts. So, long story short, if you are experiencing a regular near stoppage of processing that lets up after a second you may be experiencing an un-announced resource sharing conflict. To identify this, get into safe mode and see if it works better there, if it does, then remove all the drivers and start into normal mode. If it works well while re-installing drivers, but takes the same dump after restart, my guess is you are in the same boat as I am! Good luck and god speed sir!
"My Ubuntu 7.10 box used to crawl (well, Compiz/Nautilus/Gnome/The-UI) after several hours of continued opening/closing windows"
/tmp is full, both are easly cured.
Given that, the Windows slowdown seems to be a much deeper issue with how the OS interacts with the hardrive. No amount of defraging/cleaning of the registry seems to cure it.
"I never did investigate the issue (because laziness) and it was fixed just with a graphical logout/login"
imho, The only time you see a Linux slowdown is when the swap is totally used, or
davecb5620@gmail.com
defrag the harddrive jackass
I see a lot of good suggestions, so I will mention a couple I don't see anyone else mentioning.
Get a shell extension viewer (ShellExView) Ive found things hooking themselves into some shell behavior which makes the machine run poorly.
Pay attention to ram usage in the process explorer. Often a bad/compromised application will show up as using a lot of ram (which can cause excessive paging, which may look like a slower disk). Another sign is the IO operations/sec fields.
Get a decent network monitoring tool and look for failed connections or share logins. Sometimes a document in the recent used list will be on a network share that isn't available. This will also help locate other strange behavior. Windows likes its network connections, try unplugging your network connection and see if it gets faster/slower. Sometimes things will immediately fail (causing everything to accelerate) or the timeouts have to actually expire causing everything to run slower.
Look at what applications have been recently installed. I had a problem with S3 sleep mode on my desktop recently that was caused by an evil application's licensing service. The problem with services is that they run under the svchost process and can be hard to track down, so as others have mentioned, stop all unnecessary services.
Dont know what AV software you are running, but the new AVG 8.0 basically killed performance on my XP desktop and Vista laptop. I had serious performance issues after upgrading to this. You can install without some of the unneccesary features and turn other features off and this helped.
Computers only slow down for a few reason:
Hardware issues: (ie HD failing, power supply not giving enough power anymore, capacitors on motherbard going bad (check if they are swelling or leaking)).
Infections: You said you tried a few applications but one of the greatest kept secretes of most engineers and techs is an application called "Combofix" available from bleepingcomputer website for free. Spybot is a great tool and remember that the best anti-virus application has been a german based company called AVIRA (they have been top rated for a few years and are not as widely known because of lack of advertising... but be sure to check out their ratings on review sites).
DCOM: The heart of Windows is DCOM. In a run command type: DCOMCNFG . Insure that there is no red arrow being displayed on your computer. Check that there are 4 sub categories. click on each one and and say yes if something needs to be registered properly. If there are any issues open a command promt and type "MSDTC -install"
Indexing Services: Open Add/remove programs from the control panels. Then press add/remove windows components. Un-check Indexing. Indexing is used by servers and should not be enabled on a desktop as it is a serious resource hog.
Old, damaged or missing drivers:
open device manager and make sure all your drivers are good.
old, damaged or missing windows files: /scannnow". this will require a windows CD/DVD to replace any corrupt or missing files.
open Run and type "sfc
Permission issues:
This is tricky.. check out this website: http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2006/09/04/739820.aspx
Microsoft has a tool called subinACL and there is a script on that page that should help even those most stubborn file-system and registry.
Finally, here are two final rules for using a computer... you can only have 1 firewall on your computer and 1 anti-virus application. Using more than one will only cause issues and also cause your computer to run slow.
Be sure your Windows updates are current as well as any protection software that you use!
I hope that you and everyone else finds this information useful.
Dr. Brandon Keith
AV Computer Doctor
computerdoc74@gmail.com
661-524-4339
To stop using Microsoft Update
If you no longer want to install updates using this website, you can disable the supporting software on your computer.
You can still get updates from the Windows Update website by visiting the site or by turning on automatic updating on your computer. However, you will not be able to get updates for products other than Windows.
Disable Microsoft Update software and let me use Windows Update only
Clicking to disable, applying and then restarting the system seemed to be enough to get the systems out of their zombie like state. I believe the issue falls with the way the system is constantly scanning for updates that may be available.
Here is another thought, simple and easy to do. Make a new user. Login as that user. If the computer suddenly runs faster, the user profile you have been logging in under is too cluttered and/or corrupted and needs to be retired. If the new profile runs just as slow as the old one, you know it's not the profile, but you've only spent roughly 10 minutes to find out.
(apologizes if this has already been posted and I missed it)
It's not just the windows explorer copy that sucks. My point stands about just about any other way to do that. Total Commander, Install Shield, you name it. A lot of the IO wait translates into basically (a percentage of the) time where the whole machine does nothing else.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Actually, you illustrate exactly my problem. Better than I could. Thanks.
Let's put it like this:
1. _All_ a fragmented swap file (or any other file) adds is longer seeks back and forth to write the fragments.
2. Any competently written OS has _no_ excuse to block while waiting for a seek. It should just schedule another thread.
3. Windows does stall for seeks, as you've noticed.
Don't get me wrong, your point about the advantages of keeping the seeks short with a contiguous swap partition, is very valid too. The difference between 1-2 track seek and seek-across-the-drive is one order of magnitude.
But still, that's an optimization. That difference should just translate into maybe 1% difference in performance, as everything else (and especially the GUI threads) should be scheduled in that time. But, as you've noticed, the effect is a lot more dramatic.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Random CPU spikes from multiple applications suggest motherboard failure in my experience. Check for blown caps first and foremost.
Here is something I've noticed where I work. If you have XP SP3, and Office 2003 installed and use WSUS to do your windows update. When an update is released svchost will choke and make your computer to a crawl for a very long time.
As I'm one of a two person IT Dept for approx 600 computers in a domain environment where everyone gets Office 2003. We have taken to just announcing when we release an update to stop the cascade of my computer is broken phone calls.
Note: I believe Microsoft knows about this issue see: http://blogs.technet.com/wsus/archive/2007/05/15/srvhost-msi-issue-follow-up.aspx
So, Known bug with no hopes of a fix. Just upgrade to Office 2007 (yeah right!).
sfc /scannow will work sometimes. While not the best option have you tried an over install of XP.
...a couple of years ago. It turned out that somehow my machine had been identified as a DNS server (or similar network wide resource provider) and was the target of 10's of thousands of packets per second from the network. The slowdown was revealed when a technician hooked up a sniffer to a local hub and saw all the network traffic headed my way.
I've had good luck using Registry Mechanic to fix various types of registry problems. It's not free, but it well worth the $30. A PC can feel like new.
Another problem can occur due to networked servers being referenced in shortcuts (including the icon). If the Server is replaced with a new one with a different name then you will be waiting for network timeouts. This is most annoying and it can be tedious to examine each one. Directory listing in Explorer with the Comments field added can help.
Could be a tumor....
Some of my recent customers' computers face this issue once in a while. It seems that people forget about hardware cleaning. Most of them think that just software maintenance is Ok. I've once found a high-speed computer performing tasks really slow. I just opened it and cleaned it up. The display card was trully dusty. After that, the computer went back to its usual performance.
Also, take a look at Event Viewer, seek for warnings and errors. That may give you more clues about what the problem can be if it keeps slow after cleanup.
God is Real as long as it's not declared as Integer.
Moving air rapidly over a non-conducting surface is a recipe for generating static.
If you find you're needing that S&R helicopter to come and pick you out of the water, do NOT grab hold of the wire trailing below the winchman as he's lowered into the water near you. That's there to discharge the static the helicopter accumulates in flight, and people have had heart attack from grabbing at the leader wire. Likewise - use the earthing strap BEFORE you attach the fuel hose.
The airspeed across a helicopter's rotor is going to be in the same order of magnitude as that coming out of an air can. Which raises a potential (sorry, couldn't resist! Sorry again!!) problem in static-sensitive equipment.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Disconnect all external devices, too. I've had bad/hung hardware like USB HDDs or a scanner cause serious weird performance problems.
I had the same kind of problems with a defective USB hub, no idea why, under Windows or Linux it would drag the system down onto its knees sometimes, other times it worked fine, I spent ages trying to work out what applications or BIOS settings could be the problem, then it started preventing the system booting, thats when I got desperate and did a full check, when I unplugged the hub and found out that it was the problem I slung it, maybe your problem could be some onboard hardware dying, maybe even the USB controler?
Actually I know a guy who rode his Triumph speed triple into a deer on his way to work at about 65 mph up near Garberville and the deer won (but was quite dead).
The bike was totaled and he spent 5 weeks in the hospital and is lucky to be alive.
So yeah, the Triumph Rocket 3 looks like it would be better for deer hunting, and surviving, eh?
BTW.. if you look at back issues of one of the motorcyclist magazines from five or six years ago, the Albion Ridge V-Max guy's story is in it, the Max was originally a magazine project bike, it's totally worth the read.
If it don't GO... chrome it. ~ Frank Banks
Boot off your fav linux live cd. If it behaves poorly it could be a hardware problem. While you are booted in linux delete all of your pagefile.sys files. Windows will re-create them on the next boot. If there was a problem in one of them you have just eliminated that problem.
When faced with a slow Windows computer, I typically fix *everything*. As in "House, MD" episodes, symptoms may be indicative of a single problem, multiple problems, or the interaction between multiple problems. Treatment is often quicker (and easier) than diagnosis.
Things I do automatically:
* Scan/remove all malware, virus, trojans, etc.
* Remove all unnecessary ActiveX and browser helpers.
* Remove/deactivate/shut down all unnecessary auto-start programs and services.
* Run Disk Cleanup with all options selected
* Run Defrag
* Create a new user (hence empty profile)
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
but a lot of system boards did not have a connector for it. The result was a button that did nothing on a many whitebox PCs.
Well, it depends.
Back in the days, the clock wasn't set in the BIOS like on mordern hardware, but was set by putting jumpers on some PINs.
It would take long for some overclockers to wire the Turbo button to the clock pins to be able to switch easily between the official stock clock and an overclocked state (switching between 66Mhz and 83Mhz, for example).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
+1 insightful, not troll.
i've experienced this very problem on several laptops and finally found out that even a thin layer of dust on the small cooling ribs of the laptop cpu heat sink will cause a decrease of cpu speed due to cooling efforts of the automatic cpu speed control in modern laptops.
it usually occurs some time after booting and using your laptop and of course is os-independent. it may also occur without system alert or anything.
in order to avoid waiting terms of consulting the manufacturer's repair-service i routinely open my laptop and deliver the cooler from dust.
if you choose to do the same, be aware that you may have to completely remove the heat sink from the board so you'll need heat sink paste and a certain amout of sensitiveness.
(( Did you do that before or after taking out the power cable to shake out the loose electrons? )). Actually that's a deep remark. I have read of cases in which primitive peoples do things which ultimately DO have a scientific foundation, but the tribesman's explanation of why he does it is ridiculous. Bottom line if something experimentally seems to work then forget about the theory. In particular, "taking out the power cable" has worked for me several times, say when my ancient Dell no longer "wants to" SUSPEND correctly. Taking out the power cable has definitely fixed that, obviously there is some state-variable in some chip, no idea where. Indeed this is a worrisome thing as Windows is increasingly aggressive in saving-state-to-disk, what if the saved-state becomes corrupt, how do you reset that if the OS becomes so sure it has got it right ?
Okay, I just learned about this, but it could explain everything: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague
I, too, have some computers that became very slow. Granted, they have had Windows XP and XP x64 installed for over a year -- but that alone shouldn't slow them down this much.
I'll definitely be looking inside the cases sometime soon...
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?