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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?
Run performance counters against the computer to see what might be spiking. (Hard drive usage, memory pages /sec etc...)
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Between DiskMon, FileMon and Process Explorer - there should be nothing that you cannot see. The new generation of viruses that steal thread handlers from other processes are nasty, but very very hard to detect.
Add in wireshark, as the cause of many a slow computer has been a ISP provided DNS server that has suddenly decided to take it's sweet ass time about answering queries for A and PTR records. Usually a by-product of being under some external load that you know nothing about (it could be backing up, etc).
DiskMon in particular will show you any files that are being sought by any process, an incredibly valuable resource.
Every workstation in our company has the SysInternals complete suite installed in the C: drive. The help desk has been trained to use it. It solves alot of problems.
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wtf kind of article is this?
fucking take it to a shop if you cant handle reinstalling windows
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and somebody marked it troll??? Come on, folks, get real.
If you've got everything backed up, that should be the quickest option. (Versus spending a weekend or so digging and digging to find the problem.)
It's Windows, not Ubuntu. Last time I had a "reinstall windows" problem, it took me 2 weeks to get all the software installed and configured again. I can't just tick off what I want and hit Apply.
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System Idle Process cannot make system crawl by definition - it's not even a process, it's just the line that shows how much of your CPU is not being utilized at all.
Thing is, when the system is crawling, it needs not be CPU. Random HDD reads/writes by one process can also kill performance for the entire system very fast, and yet the process will still show up as using 1-2% CPU time in Task Manager. You can change it to show the columns for I/O though and look there.
>> Yeah, we all like Linux because it doesn't do annoying things like this
That part of the original submission is misleading/stupid (why editors didn't cut it?.) My Ubuntu 7.10 box used to crawl (well, Compiz/Nautilus/Gnome/The-UI) after several hours of continued opening/closing windows. I never did investigate the issue (because laziness) and it was fixed just with a graphical logout/login (thus, I think restarting X.)
Remember also that a lot of Linux boxes crawl when the updatedb is executed via Cron (this is the nearest thing to Windows' antiviruses in behavior.) As the parent writes, this have to do with I/O use, despite the assigned and irrelevant "nice" priorities.
The parent is correct. The difference between Linux and Windows is not that Linux doesn't slow to a crawl on occasion. No, I've seen both Linux and Windows do this. The difference (as you've demonstrated) is that when Linux slows to a crawl, you've got at least some chance at finding and fixing the cause of the slowdown.